Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The underbrush is cool and quiet. Peaceful, despite the forest’s namesake. Pansy can hear a bird landing in a tree up above, some kind of rodent off to the left—and blissfully, absolutely nothing human-shaped. Nothing that would snarl and hiss at her as soon as they realised who she was.

She trots through the brush until faced with a log, and then neatly leaps over it. The deeper into the forest she goes, the quieter it gets. The quieter her thoughts get too, the more distance she can forge from—herself. She’s still cognizant, not suddenly all animal, but she likes to pretend that she is. A cat wouldn’t care for parental expectations. A cat doesn’t worry about passing NEWTs. If another cat was mean, it could show its claws and its teeth and fight back without much consequence, providing she didn’t profoundly lose.

She passes a patch of tall yarrow and her fathers voice flickers through her mind unbidden.

A weed is just a plant, it doesn’t know it’s unwanted. No matter how many times you rip it out, it will root itself in cracks and crevices, in the poorest of soils, burgeoned on by the smallest caress of sunlight. Persistent and relentless, ever trying despite the fact that no one wants it—no one asked for it, instead actively wishing it away so as to not have to deal with it.

Irving Parkinson much preferred spending time in his garden than with his daughter. Specifically, he preferred gardening alone —Pansy only made a mess of it. She’d later realised the true problem was her status of daughter. 

Irving had always wanted a son and thus had spent the first eight years of Pansy’s life thoroughly disappointed. It was when she was eight years old that her fathers wish came true, and two fold at that, as if the gods were making up for their mistake the first time around. Two boys born in the spring, and Pansy was promptly forgotten about. 

So that was what it looked like when father was happy to see you.

If her mother had paid her attention before, it disappeared in the face of two newborns, and then two toddlers, and then two raging boys. There wasn’t anything left over for Pansy.

Nothing but expectations. That’s why she was out here in the brush in the first place, an insipid letter from her mother imploring that she mend things with Draco Malfoy left behind on the dormitory floor. The only thing Pansy was any good for—a socially advantageous marriage. 

She couldn’t stand to be around Draco this year—it was insufferable, watching him simper after Hermione Granger and see the witch enjoy it. Pansy was the one who had kissed him and loved him, back when he was unapologetic for his actions. She was the one who had put up with him being distant and horrible half of sixth year. She had tried to be there when he was fixing that stupid cabinet—

“Just tell me what’s going on, Draco. I can help you.”

“No one can help me,” he said witheringly. “Certainly not you.”

She pulled back, affronted. “What’s that meant to mean?” she demanded.

“You’re barely passing Charms or Transfiguration,” he sneered. “You’re ‘help’ would end up with me dead.”

He’d struck her where it hurt the most, where only he knew to punch, closed fist to her bleeding heart—to anyone else, Pansy didn’t give a shit about her classes. In reality, she was constantly studying, constantly trying, desperate to learn enough to stand on her own two feet and not be reliant on her parents.

“An Outstanding in Herbology really isn’t what I’m looking for,” he says with a mockingly sympathetic grimace.

Pansy hated that Herbology came so easily to her. She hated it even more that her father didn’t care.

She tried again; Draco didn’t deserve it but she couldn’t help herself. “Even if I can’t help with whatever magic you’re working on, I can still listen—”

He stepped closer, taking advantage of the growth spurt he’d had over the summer. He was all gangly, so it shouldn’t have been so intimidating but it was the way he sneered down at her that made her feel small and stupid. Worse, when he opened his mouth; “All you're good for is sucking cock. I don’t need to talk to you while you do it.”

Pansy’s expression shuttered. It was what Draco wanted—to push her away. If he was going to be such a dickhead about it, she would give him exactly what he wanted.

“Don’t start crying saying I didn’t try help when you’re about to get Avada’d by your fucking crazy aunt,” Pansy hissed and then turned on her heel and stormed off.

The idea to become animagi was a group effort at first—a way to sneak around the castle, cause chaos, prove how intrinsically magical, powerful, superior they were, etcetera, etcetera. Once Draco was caught up with being a Death Eater progeny, all the others dropped off rather promptly as well. Theo got really into the Goblin Wars, Daphne said it was too boring and complicated, Millicent stopped talking to anyone, and Blaise didn’t want to risk being permanently disfigured. It was only Pansy who had the patience for it, and the vindication—that would show Draco, saying she wasn’t good enough at magic. He wasn’t capable of becoming an animagus, was he.

It had taken three tries to keep the mandrake leaf in her mouth without swallowing it. It was disgusting, truly, this slimy, spit covered leaf beneath her tongue at all times that she grew so used to that she noticed immediately when it was gone—swallowed at dinner after a week of horribly awkward chewing during every meal. The second, she’d woken in the middle of the night to find her mouth contained only her teeth and tongue. On the third try, she barely ate, barely slept. It didn’t have much of a positive effect on her studies, which was a downside. She charmed her report card that term—her parents didn’t care enough to parse through her poorly laid deception to find the truth.

While Draco was suffering like the idiot he was repairing that beastly vanishing cabinet, Pansy was down by the lake, the moon's reflection bright across its black surface. When she looked down at her own skin in anticipation for transformation, she swore that her pale skin looked to be glowing. It was a relief and a loss when she spat the leaf into a small crystal phial. She looked back up at the sky, suddenly worried that she’d gotten it wrong, and the moon wasn’t full, but no. It still hung over her, heavy and round, and far, far away. 

She added a strand of straight, black hair taken from her fringe. Then, a silver teaspoon of dew that hadn’t seen the sun or human touch for seven days—that ingredient at least, had been reasonably straightforward to procure, seeing that no one human frequented the depths of the Forbidden Forest.

Finally, she dropped the chrysalis of a death-head hawk moth into the vial to join the leaf and spit and hair and dew. Blaise had helped her with that one, not so jealous that he would sabotage her, like Theo or Daphne. Pansy tramped back up to the castle and then down to the dungeons, the vial clutched tightly in a hand so clammy she half worried she would drop it and she’d have to start all over again.

She drew up to the stone wall entry to the Slytherin dorm, right at the same time as the one person she’d been avoiding. Here she’d been, naïvely thinking she wouldn’t have to worry about running into anyone apart from Filch’s mangy cat at this time of night.

“What are you doing up?” Draco sneered—everything was a sneer these days. She missed when he looked at her with softness.

“None of your business, Malfoy .” Not even a flicker of recognition in his eyes. He just turned to the wall, spat out the password, and then strode off ahead of her into the dark and quiet Slytherin dorm. She rolled her eyes at his back and focused on being annoyed at him and not hurt. Tightening her hold on the vial, the long cylindrical shape of it pressing harder to her palm, made her feel better.

The vial went beneath her bed, warded to the best of her ability. She’s weaved a fierce enough history with Daphne and Millie about not touching her things, there was no chance they would risk snooping.

It was three more months until there was a proper enough storm, and so it was three months of hiding behind closed bed-curtains and a muffliato charm, chanting the incantation amato animo animato animagus every sunrise and sunset. Her roommates thought she was acting weird—Daphne sternly told her to stop shutting herself away, but Pansy cared more about proving this, on achieving it, of creating some semblance of safety for herself, to care what they thought. She told Daphne to leave her the fuck alone.

It was during the second month that she felt a second heart beat beneath her wand tip, pressed to her chest. Excitement leapt, but she held it back, remaining calm. Happiness was not worth the risk of fucking up.

Pansy drew out the potion from beneath her bed as soon as the storm had passed. She skipped class to stand in the damp forest and hold her wand over her heart one final time, amato animo animato animagus falling off her tongue with familiarity, worn like grooves that would never fade. Then, she drank the blood red potion.

A searing pain split her body and the world around her was growing, bigger and bigger. Relief flooded—she’d worried of turning into something large, something conspicuous, something that could be weaponised. She didn’t want to be a weapon. She wanted to be a girl.

It was odd, figuring out what a cat looked like from the perspective of being a cat. Black, furry legs. Paws. Claws.

✦

Pansy buries her bad memories in a garden in her mind (some good as well, if they sting to touch). Roots tucked away so she would have to dig to unearth them. The plants that grow are poisonous, though, and a haze lingers from the toxins they secrete.

Padding through the forest hasn’t cleared her mind as well as she had hoped. She has a sneaking suspicion as to why this is, but it’s not one she’s addressing. She cuts a wide u-turn and heads back up to the castle.

It’s easier to move through Hogwarts as a cat than a girl. Cats could slip through crowds, bound up stairs with ease. Also, people didn’t scowl at them upon first sight. There was a group of third year girls who cooed at her each time they saw her—she avoided their outstretched hands, not wanting to be touched. 

It was preferable to the barbs and curses, better than being called a Death Eater slag. The insult didn’t make sense—she’d never been a Death Eater and she’d only had sex with Draco while they were dating. It wasn’t worth pointing that nuance out to people, though. After years of poking at others' insecurities, perhaps it was karma. Perhaps she was racking up more and more debt, avoiding it as she did in the form of a cat. A black one at that, particularly favoured amongst witches and wizards.

More concerned with her current quality of life than long term karma reaped, Pansy spends a lot of her life as a cat. It’s totally normal and not weird, Draco is just jealous that his attempts at becoming an animagus failed where hers succeeded.

Pansy slips through Seamus Finnegan’s ankles when he opens the doorway to the eighth year common room. Crookshanks leaps off the back of the couch he was treating as his throne to traipse over and lick the side of her face, which is disgusting if she lets herself think about it too long, but she’s not going to ruin the good reputation she’s built up with him. 

She remembers vividly the first time they encountered each other. It was in the Forbidden Forest, back when she had been too nervous to risk being in her animagus form within the castle. She’d frozen, hair rising all the way down her back, captured under his moon-sized amber eyes. Then, he blinked at her. Slowly, purposefully, and she thought this is it. Granger’s scruffy old cat is about to slit my throat.

She hadn’t died though, had continued living long enough to read every piece of cat behavioural psychology she could get her hands on. She chirps at him now in greeting, and then trots off down the hall.

Crookshanks doesn’t approve, but he won’t stop her.

The bedroom door is just slightly ajar, she sniffs at the opening. He’s already inside. She slinks in low to the floor, hoping he won’t see her.

She makes it halfway across the room before she has to leap over an upturned box stamped with a Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes logo, drawing attention when she touches down on crumpled paper on the other side, a discarded Potions essay.

“Oi!” Weasley lurches up from where he had been reclining on his bed. 

Pansy freezes. She’s always just freezing .

“Get out of here!” he flaps his arms at her. She darts straight for the wardrobe—its doors are always open. Inside, the floor is a sea of clothing—more so, than the rest of his room. It’s warm and dark and smells like musk and caramelised sugar.

Footsteps boom like a giant’s, the wardrobe door is ripped all the way open. Pansy wriggles through a gap, and slips out of sight behind a box filled with old Chocolate Frog cards.

“Bloody cat,” Weasley growls. “You’re gonna piss in there, aren’t you.”

Pansy is horrified at such an idea. She has in fact never relieved herself while in her animagus form, she much prefers performing her absolutions in human form, thank you very much.

Heavy footsteps stomp away. “Mione! There’s a cat in my room, won’t you get Crookshanks to kick it out?”

Pansy circles her spot a few times before settling down on the soft fabric, an old knitted sweater, blue and yellow, that Weasley seems to have forgotten about. She’s just closed her eyes, started up a quiet purr, when there’s movement at the front of the wardrobe again.

“Here kitty.” Granger clicks her tongue. “Heeeere kitty. Where are you? I promise I won’t let Ron hurt you.”

“I wasn’t going to hurt it!” Weasley protests.

Granger snorts.

Pansy ignores them both, although her breath is held, no longer purring.

“There’s no evidence of a cat in here, Ron. Are you sure you weren’t seeing things?”

“I did not hallucinate a little black cat breaking into my room,” he says, affronted.

“Crookshanks doesn’t seem bothered at all,” Granger remarks.

“That’s because he’s a lazy bag of bones.”

She gasps. “He is not!”

The voices fade, the doors shut almost all the way, just a wide enough gap for Pansy to nudge her way back out. She lets her eyes sink back closed, the soothing rumbling of a purr deep in her chest restarting. Surrounded by soft darkness that smells like caramel, where no one can sneak up on her and no one knows to look for her, she slips easily into sleep.

Chapter Text

She’s venturing out of the wardrobe, thinking of getting down to the Great Hall for dinner early, when he descends on her. His hands span her entire middle.

Weasley marches her out of his room, holding her at arm's length, and her little heart patters rapidly against his fingers.  “Whose cat is this?” he demands, spits out cat like it’s a dirty word.

Those currently occupying the common room look up long enough to clock the situation before turning away with disinterest. A smirk erupts over Blaise’s face, but he remains silent.

“No one?” Weasley tries again.

“Maybe Katie,” Longbottom suggests. “She was saying something to me about wanting a cat.”

Weasley bends down just slightly and then lets her go, half a meter from the floor. “Stay out of my room,” he mutters. 

She darts away before anything more terrible can happen.

✦

She shouldn’t be back here. He’ll just kick her out again.

She aims for beneath the bed this time—he won’t expect it. She huddles there, eyes closed but ears pricked, and is immediately alert when she hears his entry. He shuts the bedroom door firmly behind him. Shit, now she can’t leave whenever she wants.

He’s rummaging around for ages. His shoes get kicked off, and then his pants and his white shirt and Gryffindor striped tie. Pansy wriggles further forward, feeling like a voyeur but not guilty enough to stop. He has nice legs—from all the quidditch, she guesses. His back is quite lovely too, broad and smattered with freckles like the sun couldn’t stop kissing him. He pulls on sweatpants and then leaps onto the bed. She flinches—it protests loudly under his weight, but holds.

She relaxes, her mind quieting to a hum instead of a calamity. Her eyes half lidded, she listens to the sounds of Ron breathing. There’s a lot of sniffing happening.

Her attention catches on movement on the floor.

Just as there are plenty of places for a cat to hide in Weasley’s room, there are even more for bugs, the amount of items scattered over the floor creating a million tiny crevices.

The way the spider moves enraptures her, tickling some part of her brain. She wants to swipe at it. Jump on it. Bat it sideways and chase it. With long, skinny black legs it climbs the slope of a discarding clothing pile and disappears over the other side. Pansy can’t help herself, she leaps out from under the bed and on top of the spider.

“Fucking shit!” Weasley yelps. “I shut the door, how did you get in here?”

Pansy looks at him, wondering if he’s stupider than she’d ever suspected. It was open before he came in, wasn’t it? Beneath her paw, the spider wriggles.

Her attention drawn back, watches it with fascination. One of its legs is trapped by her paw, the other legs futilely attempting an escape. Can spiders survive with seven legs, she wonders.

Weasley leans off the bed to see. His eyes are red rimmed and blood shot, his cheeks blotchy with red pigment; he’s been crying again. “What have you got?”

She lifts her paw out of the way.

“Oh god, a spider?” His voice immediately rises an octave. “Did you bring that in here?” he asks, horrified.

She flicks a look up at him. Did he really think that’s what cats spent their time doing?

“Kill it, ohmygod, where’s my wand? Have to kill it, fucking Merlin.”

While he’s scrounging for his wand between his ghastly quilt and dark red sheets, Pansy lifts her paw centrally over the black eight-legged apparent-miscreant, and then firmly squashes it. Chances were low that it was the animagus form of anyone she knew.

“Did you just kill that spider for me?” Weasley asks. She looks up again to see his face painted with awe. “You are so much better than Crookshanks.”

Pansy preens—it’s a high compliment to receive. Crookshanks was a fearsome cat.

Ron flops back down on the bed, heaving an epic sigh. He rolls his head to look over at her. “You can stay, if you kill all the spiders.”

Pansy feels like smiling, but cats aren’t really capable of such expression. She heads back under the bed, closer to him than the wardrobe and that feels important for some reason. He doesn’t ask her to leave. 

Some time later, his head hangs over the side of the bed. The crying is less evident now, only a faint redness to the whites of his eyes. “Still here,” Ron confirms out loud. “I’d wondered if you’d disappeared, since it seems like you can get through closed doors.”

She blinks at him to say no, you idiot. You left the door open.

Still hanging upside down—his face looks odd, freckled cheeks squishing up slightly against his eyes, his bright hair stretching out like gentle flames to the floor—he reaches out his hand. It’s a lot of skin, long-healed scars wind up his forearm to his bare shoulders like a Devil Snare grew around him until it was forcibly removed.

She sniffs his fingers; it feels like the cat-like thing to do. He seems satisfied, letting his hand drop to the floor.

“I’m going down to dinner. Should I bring something back for you?” They watch each other for a moment. Pansy’s not sure what she thinks—it’s kind of nice of him, isn’t it? She can’t remember the last time someone offered to bring her something back from the dining hall. Maybe Theo, but it’s always something with a bite taken out of it. No one who didn’t already have an obligation to her, no one who maybe just liked her for who she was. (A cat that killed spiders?) 

“Only to say thank you,” he says. “For the spider.”

A knock on the door and then; “What are you doing?”

Pansy startles at the unfamiliar voice. Ron drags himself back up.

“Nothing. I’m coming.”

“Put a shirt on, will you?” Granger complains. 

“I was in the privacy of my own room,” Ron retorts, but he’s of course pulling a jumper over his head, shoving his slides on. 

He follows Granger out of the room, turning back as if to look at her, but she can’t see his face from this angle beneath the bed. He pauses a moment, then slides the door almost all the way shut.

“Just in case you can’t walk through doors,” he murmurs, and then he’s gone.

Chapter Text

Ron enters the common room clucking his tongue. “Here kitty,” he says, ducking to see behind the couch.

Straightening, he pulls back a curtain. “Has anyone seen a little black cat?” he asks.

Pansy’s cheeks burn. She turns away so he won’t catch it and ask what’s wrong with her face. Beside her in the window seat, Millie continues filing her nails with her wand.

“The one you were asking about yesterday?” Neville asks.

“Yeah.” He clucks his tongue again. “Here, sweetie,” he calls again.

Pansy’s heart thumps at the term of endearment and she lurches up out of her seat by the window, darting off to her shared dormroom. Daphne is still at dinner, thankfully, so she’s able to quickly strip off her outer layers and then shift. She dislikes shifting with her whole kit on, something about it creeps her out, makes her feel weighed down. Also, she doesn’t want to turn half white from her school shirt. Perhaps her black fur reflects her blackened soul, but she’s grown attached to it.

Leaving her belongings in a disorderly heap on the floor, she bounds out of the room and down the hall. Ron has retreated to his bedroom, still clucking his tongue as he pokes his head into the wardrobe. “Heeeere kitty.”

Unsure of how else to get his attention, she stands in the middle of the room and meows.

Ron whips around, a smile on his face. “There you are!” He crouches down, a smite too fast for her skittish instincts. “Sorry,” he apologises. “I brought you something.”

He holds out his hand, maintaining distance by stretching out his arm to its full length, not wanting to frighten her again.

He’s brought her a piece of cod from dinner. Pansy is not impressed.

“Do you not like fish?” Ron asks, shoving the scrap of stinky white meat closer to her. She flinches back, her eyes narrowing, the smell far more overwhelming than it had been when she sat down at dinner next to Blaise. “What kind of cat doesn’t like fish,” he mutters to himself, and then uses his wand to vanish the offending morsel. “I’ll have to try something else.”

His attention returns to her. She’s not sure what to expect now. Should she find another spider to kill?

“You’re not a very big cat,” Ron muses. “Are you still a baby?”

He waves his wand and conjures a string to lead from the tip of his wand to end in a feather. He waggles it in front of her face. Pansy stares at him in disbelief.

“No?” he asks even as he tries it again, making the feather jump and fall. “Okay, fine.” He puts his wand away, the string and feather disappearing. He leans forwards and suddenly his hand is on her shoulders. 

What the fuck. 

His hand moves in soothing scratches over her neck, and then down beneath her chin. A deep purr starts up in her chest. Pansy is mortified but fuck—it feels wonderful. No wonder Crookshanks is always demanding pets from Draco. There’s something about how big his hands are, how they engulf her. They taste like safety.

Suddenly, they’re wrapping around her more firmly, her feet are lifting off the ground—she lets out a petulant meow, kicks out with her back feet.

“Ow!” Ron promptly drops her on the floor. “What was that for? I was trying to be nice.”

She doesn’t want to hear his explanations—she goes back to hiding in the closet.

✦

There’s only one window seat in the eighth year common room. It’s as romantic as one would expect, leadlight windows that fog with her breath if she spends too long looking out at the mile high view of the school grounds. Pansy can see both the dense Forbidden Forest and the Black Lake. Even all the way up here, far away from places to hide, it feels close. A safety net.

A garish blanket is spread out across a thin pillow, green and silver, but also gold and red, blue and bronze, yellow and black. Something made by the elves to represent house unity. Pansy can’t look at it too long without feeling sick with vertigo.

It’s a covetous place to sit within the eighth year common room and thus, not somewhere that Pansy should be allowed to lay claim to. Thankfully, Daphne is a dab hand at dark charms and has hexed the cushions to be thin and bruising to the buttocks for anyone who isn’t a Slytherin.

Pansy twists her wand in the air again, trying to get the angle of it right. It’s not just an unhealthy obsession—it’s important for her N.E.W.T. examination in June to be able to perform non-sentient-to-sentient Transfiguration. She barely managed to get into McGonnagal’s class in the first place—she highly suspects that the Headmistress had taken pity on her, and she hates it. If only she could saunter into McGonnagal’s classroom in her animagus form and make a show of shifting back into her human form. It’d be a guaranteed Outstanding.

The gobstone shrinks and sprouts legs, but it remains half green, half translucent. It spits out a spray of stinking yellow fluid and scuttles along the window sill. Pansy squashes it with the brunt of her wand before it can escape and then places another gobstone onto the windowsill, a pink one this time. Why couldn’t the second years she stole these off not just have black ones? Ron will think it’s too strange if he finds brightly coloured spiders in his room—surely his arachnophobia wouldn’t blind him to the oddness of that.

“What the fuck are you doing?” The pure disgust breaks her concentration. A pale pink spider scuttles up the windowpane.

Pansy looks up at Ron, eyes wide in shock at being caught. She licks her lips, finds her voice. “Practicing for Transfiguration.”

“With spiders?” he demands. He’s standing more than a meter away, as if he fears she’ll chuck a gobstone at him and transfigure it before it lands.

“Sentient to non sentient,” she says weakly.

“You’re actually like, evil incarnate.” He shakes his head in wonder.

“Some people think spiders are cute.”

“Yeah, evil people.” He eyes the spider on the window with revulsion. A bright pink spot against the black leading of the window, failing to camouflage. “Keep them to yourself, will you?”

He backs away before she can say anything, keeping an eye on the spider as if it’ll suddenly apparate closer to him. She’d been planning on letting them loose in his room so that she’d have easy access to them later, hoping to replicate the look of awe he’d given her. The genuine thanks, the softness he touched her with.

Even if she perfects the transfiguration, all eight legs, black or brown instead of turquoise or orange, and then finds a way to control their movements, like setting a parameter around how far they go, he’ll know it was her. A sudden influx of spiders in his room and his dislike of her would triple. Worse in his eyes than anything she’s ever done before. 

Pansy sighs, flicks her wand to transfigure the pink spider back to a gobstone. Victimised by gravity, it falls immediately, clinking off the windowsill and tumbling down and out of her reach. She doesn’t try retrieve it.

Chapter Text

She watches him from the wardrobe, a voyeur to his sadness. He’s crying again. She doesn’t know why he does this to himself. He has some photographs and a deck of cards, likely spelled some way or another. He flicks through them until tears spill down his cheeks, flowing as smoothly as a stream from an ice cap run off.

She feels guilty for being here, for witnessing this. In the hallways, in Charms and Transfiguration, at the dining hall (not the library; he’s never in the library (unless she just hasn’t found where he sits yet)), Weasley seems happy. He makes easy conversation with his friends, he laughs effortlessly, he rolls his eyes good naturedly when a joke is made at his expense. He barely flinches when someone mentions the Dark Lord, he doesn’t get tense when people bring up what occurred at only the beginning of the year.

She feels guilty for being in the wardrobe and not under the bed, as if her closeness, even unbeknownst to him, could provide some sort of comfort. A reciprocation of the comfort that he unknowingly provides for her.

But she has never been brave. He could yell at her for coming in here again. He could be embarrassed at being caught crying. So she does all she can; sit and watch and wish.

✦

She’s under his bed again, but he doesn’t know. He was too focused on his quidditch magazine when she crept in. She told herself to go for the wardrobe, where it was safe, where he couldn’t reach her, but then found herself taking the path to the bed until she was beneath it and there she stayed.

It was only for a few hours. It was meditative; deep breathing and clearing her thoughts—she just happened to be in the form of a cat beneath Ron Weasley’s bed while she did it.

Ron shifts on the mattress above her, the slats of the bed creaking. A bedside draw is pulled open, something loud and crinkly pulled out. He munches loudly on the bag of crisps—did he not pay any attention in his etiquette classes when he was younger? Sure, he thought he was alone, but Pansy struggled to ever turn off the part of her brain that wasn’t a tutor with a penchant for stinging jinxes when she didn’t sit up straight enough.

Suddenly, a hand is reaching off the bed to the floor. Then, his face appears.

“Hi sweetheart,” he greets her. “You came back.”

She blinks at him.

“Do you like crisps?” He thrusts a cheese and onion crinkle cut crisp at her. Pansy’s not sure cats eat crisps.

“I’ll take that as a no. I have something else we could try.” He disappears back up onto the bed and when he next appears, he’s off the bed completely and laying down on his stomach to meet her face to face.

A can in his hand, he pulls the nozzle and a burst of spray cream erupts out onto two outstretched fingers. He holds it out to her and she figures well—he keeps offering. It would only be polite of her to accept.

The grin that takes over Ron’s face is well worth it. When he smiles wide enough, his cheeks dimple and his eyes crease.

Once she finishes the cream, they watch each other. Pansy wonders if she’s entered some kind of staring contest unawares and then decides she must be the one to win it.

His eyes are as blue as a summer’s sky. They make Pansy think of the idea of happiness. It’s a slippery concept, not one she can recall as solidly as one would like.

Ron blinks first, slowly, like he’s tired. “You must get cold down here,” he says. 

I’m a cat, she thinks. Beneath his bed is a lot warmer than other places a cat could be.

He hops up without warning and rummages through his wardrobe. He drops back down to the floor and shows her what he’s found. It’s the same texture as the jumper she slept on in the back of his closet, except this one is maroon instead of dark blue. “Mum knitted this for me. It’s hideous but it’s very warm.” His movements are slow, afraid of scaring her off again, so she stays as still as possible as he tucks the jumper over her like a blanket. Pansy doesn’t think anyone’s ever done that for her before.

“You can stay all night, if you want,” Ron says, his voice quiet. A quiet moment, as they watch each other again. “You know,” he clears his throat, “because of the spiders. Make sure you kill them if you see any.” Then he’s springing back up onto his feet and Pansy can no longer stare into his cerulean eyes.

✦

Pansy approaches Ron slowly. He peers a puffy eye open, feigning sleep, but Pansy knows. She settles down next to his elbow. The bed is warm from his body, and it smells more strongly of him here. Not musty like the wardrobe, which she’d been kidding herself thinking smelled good when the source was right here.

She tucks her feet beneath her, blinking slower and slower. He hasn’t knocked her off the bed yet.

When her eyes have fully closed and she’s forgotten to open them again, the gentle weight of his palm settles over the top of her head, his fingers gently smoothing down her neck to her back. She begins purring almost immediately, and it would be mortifying if Weasley had any idea of what was happening. Luckily, her dark black fur hides any potential blushing—which she likely is, considering how hot she feels now.

She ends up curled at his side, between the firmness of his ribs and his arm, wrapped around her. Daphne and Millie will notice her absence overnight, but she can’t bring herself to leave.

Chapter Text

Most of the time, it isn’t kids her own age that are the problem. Harry had granted her amnesty, and no one disagreed with Harry Potter. No, it’s the younger ones who target her, and that just makes it all the more pathetic.

Unfortunately, she can’t attend classes as a cat (her animagus status being unregistered, it would likely end in her arrest, amongst other bothersome outcomes), and so Pansy must run the gauntlet of the Hogwarts corridors to get to class, arms loaded with her classwork that she couldn’t carry without hands, anyway.

She hears them notice her, but she keeps her attention strictly forward, glaring at anything that dares enter her eyeline.

“Oi, Parkinson!” James Peakes’s voice grates her, she grits her teeth.

“We’re talking to you.” Richard Cootes grabs her arm, dragging her to a sudden stop. She almost drops her books.

Peakes raises his eyebrows. “Won’t you say good morning to us, like a good little pureblood princess?”

She juts her chin out and remains silent—she won’t play along.

Wand in hand, Cootes reaches towards her. She steps back and is met with the writhing throng of moving bodies. A flick of his wand at her notebook, precarious at the top of her stack, falls to the floor.

“Whoops,” Cootes simpers.

“Aren’t you going to pick it up?” Peakes taunts. They stand firm, like immovable brick walls. They are beaters on the Gryffindor team, after all,  and they won’t be moving until she’s down on her knees, mussing her palms over the dusty floor.

Pansy reaches for her wand, she’ll just accio it—Peakes tuts. “Ritchie, how quick do you think McGonnagal’ll come, if I start hollering that Parkinson used an Unforgivable against me?”

“I wouldn’t wait until she does it,” Cootes says. “We know she’s done it before.”

Her eyes narrow and she tucks the wand away. It hadn’t been her choice to use the Cruciatus curse against other students last year. If she hadn’t been able to spend as much time as a cat as she had, she imagines she would have had to use the curse even more. Pansy Parkinson, a reluctant weapon in the hands of the Carrow twins.

Giving up, she crouches and reaches for the notebook. It dances out of her grasp at the last moment, she falls forward on her knees, hard. The rest of her books slip from where she had clutched them to her chest.

A dark laugh, not Cootes or Peakes. Something worse. Pansy makes the mistake of looking up to confirm and meets cerulean blue eyes. His cheeks are dimpled with the extent of his mirth.

She feels small, easily squashed, with three boys—nearly fully grown men—standing over her. Her heart beats faster, the phantom of a second heartbeat, and she reminds herself that shifting right now wouldn’t be as helpful as her panic tells her it would be.

“What you doing on the floor, Parkinson?” Weasley mocks. “Gonna crawl to class?”

The insult is worse, because she wishes she could attend class on all fours.

“Ron, just leave it,” Granger huffs. She tugs on his arm, the one that had been curled around Pansy in bed earlier.

She’s silent, like she’s been robbed of all words. She misses the old Pansy, who came back with biting remarks without having to ruminate on it for hours, who didn’t care when people didn’t like her—although. She’s misremembering. She’s always cared when people don’t like her. It just used to feel like something she could control . People don’t hate her now because they fear her, because of something she’s said to cut them down—they hate her because she symbolises everything evil, because in a moment of sickening fear, she tried to take down Harry Potter. Because she was a coward. She is a coward, still.

Weasley looks her up and down, makes sure she sees the revulsion in his face, before letting Granger pull him away. Her cheeks burn, embarrassment blazing through her. She knew it from the start, it was a mistake to build this one sided friendship with him. 

He doesn’t even realise how badly he’s made her feel. Would he be satisfied? Or would he feel guilty?

Cootes and Peakes chortle, elbowing each other in their glee, at having the great big war hero Ron Weasley approve of their scare tactics. They leave her in the dust, gathering her charms textbooks and notes.

It’s not until she stands that she sees the state of her knees. She’d registered the pain, but she’d been too caught up to truly realise. Both are grazed, skin torn unevenly, dust and dirt pressed into the wounds. 

A streak of blood makes a path down her shin as she walks the rest of the way to class; she’s never been very good at healing charms.

✦

He has the photos out again, the deck of cards. Pansy doesn’t want to see him cry again, in fact, she’s decided she hates it. He’s not built for grief like this. He’s meant for raucous, socially-offensive laughter; trying broom tricks that are slightly beyond his skill level but still somehow landing it; cruising the Hogwarts halls with his hundred-odd friends as if he’s King of the school.

She’d told herself she would start forging distance between herself and King Weasley, but how could she leave him like this?

Pansy leaps up onto the bed, forcing herself into the circle of his arms. She rubs her face against his chin, she doesn’t even mind too much that his cheeks are wet.

“Careful, sweetheart. Don’t stand on Fred.”

He tucks her closer, beneath his chin. He is firm and solid against her, she can feel the steady beat of his heart. He’s quiet for a long time, looking at the photos, and she can’t see his face to check for tears.

 “I was nine here,” he says, and she can feel the vibration of where his voice begins, deep in his chest. He holds a photo so she can see it; three boys, two identical and one younger, cheesing at the camera. “It was the last summer before Fred and George went to Hogwarts.” He pauses as they both gaze at the photograph. The twins elbow each other, Ron hangs off one of their arms. Pansy can’t tell them apart. “Mum was relieved, I was devastated.

“They were always causing chaos, I followed after them everywhere.” He tucks the photo to the back of the stack, showing her the next one. They look slightly younger, maybe, this time in a disorderly bedroom, building a blanket fort. “I was desperate to be as cool as them. Ginny was around of course, but she was a girl. The twins were way more interesting.”

He flicks through more of the photos, Pansy watches it unfold like one of those picture-movies they watched in Muggle Studies, this one titled RON WEASLEY’S CHILDHOOD. There are hardly any photos where Fred and George aren’t together. Ron can always tell them apart, but Pansy doesn’t see what he sees. It’s as if someone cast a gemino spell on them. It makes her feel guilty, for how long it took her to tell the Parkinson twins apart. Sorrel and Rowan were as similar to each other as Fred and George, but it seemed that Ron had never had the same difficulties as Pansy did to tell his siblings apart. (She’d also wanted nothing to do with squalling infants that her parents instantly cared about more than they did her, and then she feels guilty for resenting her brothers when one of Ron’s has died.)

“When I was five or so, they tried to get me to do an Unbreakable Vow. It was probably something about eating worms or not telling mum they’d broken something she cared about. It would’ve only been a handshake, they didn’t even have wands. Dad went mental though. Fred used to joke that his left buttock was never the same again… I always thought it wasn’t Fred’s fault, I wanted to do the vow. It’s not like they were forcing me into it.”

A crusty looking blue car, Ron stands in the back seat while Fred and George are in the front, one of them pretending to steer erratically. She can almost hear the sound effects the boys would make, the roar of an engine, the squeal of brakes. She wonders why they had a car, when wizards normally don’t. Her father certainly never would—she recalls overhearing conversations from a time when she was much smaller (because she was a little girl, not a cat) with his upturned nose wrinkled as he voiced his distaste of the vehicle Lucius Malfoy had recently purchased.

“Hermione told me I have middle child syndrome,” Ron muses. “Something about being a mediator and always feeling left out—or maybe she said misunderstood. I don’t remember. It was months ago, when we were in the tent, and we were drunk.” 

He pauses. Pansy wonders what eldest child syndrome would look like, and if it would be the same if the parents involved actually liked you to begin with.

“I mean, I think we must’ve been, I don’t know why else we would’ve been talking about it.”

A picture of Ron on Fred’s shoulders. Pansy can tell this time, because of the yellow F knitted on the front of his blue jumper.

Ron squints at it, drawing it closer. “I’m ninety percent sure that’s George. Mum knitted the jumpers to tell them apart and then they’d swap them just to mess with her.”

He turns to the next photograph.

“This was Christmas. Look, you can see Harry was there that year.” He sounds truly happy upon this reflection and he points Harry out to Pansy, as if she doesn’t know who he is. She supposes a cat likely wouldn’t know, and then gets lost in imagining all the social nuances of society she wouldn’t have to bother herself with if she truly were a cat.

Next, Fred and George are playing chess sprawled out on the floor while Ron watches, chin propped up on his fist. His face is cherubic and pure with baby fat, eyes like saucers.

“I don’t know how Hermione can talk, anyway, seeing as she guaranteed has only child syndrome, and that sounds a lot worse to me.”

Another picture of Christmas, this one from the year that Ron grew his hair out outrageously long. He skips past it more quickly than the others with a muttered, “Eugh.” Pansy doesn’t think it looks as terrible as she remembers.

“Fred was the middle child, anyway. Now, no one’s in the middle.”

He rests his chin on top of her head. She wishes she could read his expression—sad, hopeful, bitter, angry?

“I wish we’d made some kind of vow that stopped Fred from dying,” he says and her question is answered. Regret.

Chapter Text

Ron enters the room like a hurricane, slapping the door shut and launching himself onto his bed with a mighty groan.

Interest piqued, Pansy stands from where she had been curled at the end of the bed—she’d just been taking a break from real life.

Even at Hogwarts, people assume it safe to discuss whatever they like within earshot of animals; owls, rats, frogs, cats. Even if not animagi, Pansy thinks it’s ridiculously naïve—as if Crookshanks wouldn’t commit retribution if he believed someone had slighted his mistress. She’d taken a break from studying to roam the castle as a cat and overheard enough shitty comments about how many sexual favours she handed out to vile men old enough to be her father during the war that Ron’s room truly felt like the only safe place within the castle. 

Honestly, did those sixth year girls have nothing more interesting happening in their lives to talk about? Pansy knows they are the pathetic ones, not her. And yet, it feels as if her stomach is filled with so many stones, she would sink straight to the bottom of the Black Lake. 

She just needed half an hour of not being constantly on guard before she returned to her classwork.

Now, she traipses up the bed and then sits right next to his shoulder, face down on the bed as he is.

He lifts his head to look at her. “Sweetheart, I didn’t see you there.” He smiles at her. Pansy headbutts his nose and he smiles wider.

After patting her for a few moments, he presses his face to her fur and says, “Cats are so much simpler than girls.”

Pansy rather disagrees with that statement.

“What was I thinking, trying with Padma? She’s way too smart for me, just like Mione.”

Pansy disagrees with that statement too. A contrarian meow leaves her mouth. 

Fuck, the speech limitations of being a cat are annoying. 

He lifts his face from where it was pressed to her fur and then kisses the top of her head, between her pointed ears.

Ron Weasley just kissed her on the fucking head. While she was a fucking cat. And she liked it.

She’s letting this go way too far. 

She misses the easy affection of a boyfriend. Draco used to do it with her, lay his head in her lap even when other people were around. Now he’s busy trying to get Granger to let him do it to her and Pansy is left with nothing.

What can she do to get Ron to kiss her head again?

“You smell like cherries, you know. Where do you hang out, the kitchens?” His eyes brighten. “Cherry cobbler for dessert, is it?”

His excitement is almost innocent, although Pansy knows that Ron is far from it. It’s nice to pretend though, that neither of them have faced as much as they have. 

She wonders, briefly concerned if she should stop using her perfume so that he won’t smell it on her. But then—if a cat smelling like cherries is making her more endearing to Ron Weasley, she doesn't think she’ll be able to stop herself.

✦

“Who does she belong to?” Granger asks.

He shrugs. “I already tried asking around the common room.”

“So no one in eighth year then.”

“Maybe she got lost,” Ron says, making no move to evict Pansy from his bed.

“She probably belongs to a third year.” Suddenly, Granger’s hands are around Pansy’s middle and she’s being lifted off the bed. She looks to Ron in panic. She can’t scratch Hermione fucking Granger, Draco would curse her tits off.

“Careful, Mione,” Ron chastens, sitting up quickly. “Where are you taking her?”

“She’s probably gotten lost and now she’s stuck in here, because of the password door.” Granger marches out of the room with Pansy tucked against her chest. The smell of coconut and hibiscus is almost overwhelming. Pansy tries to wriggle away without using her claws, manages to scramble far enough up to look over Hermione’s shoulder. She can barely see past the mass of curls, but she catches a glimpse of Ron’s gormless expression.

“I’m sure her owner will be worried about her if she’s gone overnight.”

“You can’t just kick her out, she’ll get cold!”

“She’s a cat, Ron.”

“I’m sure cats get cold!” he argues.

“She has a literal fur coat.” Granger holds out her arms, Pansy leaps to the ground. She turns to dart back between their legs but the wall is promptly shut in her face.

She meows at the bricks. They remain sealed shut.

Cats don’t have voice boxes capable of human speech. She had shifted as she usually did, in the privacy of her bed curtains, without any plans to leave the safety of the eighth year turret. She couldn’t shift back now without providing a show to everyone currently within the common room, clad in only her black knickers.

Pansy paces for a while… Until she gets bored, and then she curls up in a dark, dusty corner, feeling lonely and rejected and horrible.

It’s nearly midnight when Crookshanks finds her. He nudges her awake, forehead to forehead. Almost a kiss, and it does something to mend Pansy’s bruised heart.

She follows Crookshanks to the entry to the eighth year common room, the brick wall still open.

“Did you just let Crooks kiss you?” Draco asks as she slinks past. “That’s foul.”

As if he’s never let Crookshanks headbutt him.

“No ‘thank you’?” he calls after her, but she’s already halfway down the hall. Slipping through the bedroom door and jumping up onto her bed. She shifts as soon as she hits the sheets, relief settling through her girl-shaped limbs. Her animagus form is freedom, until it isn’t.

Chapter Text

Pansy was six when Lichen left. 

It took her a while to figure out what had happened—she was six. Not yet old enough to possess the necessary deductive skills. Too young to have completely lost faith in the world. (The world being her parents—because that’s what the world was when you were that young.)

Lichen had been gone for a few days. Hadn’t been the elf to wake her in the morning, drawing open her bedroom curtains. Hadn’t been there to help her get dressed or to serve her breakfast. Her tutor was brought through by Bract, a grouchy old elf who Pansy was more than a little afraid would eat her in the middle of the night. Lichen said those fears were unfounded, that Bract was just a grumpy old elf who hardly liked anyone or anything, but she wasn’t around to say so and so Pansy flinched when he spoke to her. Her tutor had not responded kindly to that.

Pansy was sure that she’d done something wrong. Lichen was upset with her—she didn’t know why, but she didn’t need to know why to know it was true. Sometimes adults just got that way, found out about something you did without you even knowing that it was wrong or that your transgression had been witnessed, and then decided to be pissed off about it. They’d tell you eventually, after a week or so of unimpressed looks and stilted conversations that were layered with derision and disappointment, until they decided to feel like finally telling you what awful atrocity you had committed.

Naturally, she responded to Lichen’s abandonment of her by climbing the tallest tree in the garden. She was not coming down until Lichen came to fetch her—her nanny elf wouldn’t just leave her in a tree.

It was nice at first, surrounded by the sun. The branches didn’t scrape at her skin, they held her aloft, so sturdy that she felt safe even so far from the ground. Bugs came to visit her and she handled them gently. A bird landed on a branch nearby and when she sat very still, it hopped closer. Three hops exactly, watching her with its head cocked.

“Hello,” she whispered.

The bird chirped and then flew away. It had felt like a nice moment.

The birds and bugs slowly disappeared as the sun sunk into the skyline, taking its heat with it. She was only in a short sleeved dress—no one had been around to tell her to put a coat on before she went outside, or cast a sun protection spell. Her arms are rosy pink, the skin slightly too tight, but the sunburn only chills her further.

She sat in the tree, shivering, clinging to the branch beneath her as the darkness descended, stubborn to remain until Lichen came for her. 

Too hard headed for her own good, she remained far above the ground until it was too dark to get down safely. 

The night was dark and scary. Owls hooted. Rats scurried. Bugs flew into her face more than once, until she was slapping herself to get them away.

“Lumos,” she whispered to her pointed finger, scared to speak too loudly in case it alerted the monsters that hid in the dark of her exact location. Most likely, perched a few branches over. “Lumos, lumos.”

She didn’t yet have a wand, but she’d had a few incidences of accidental magic. Mostly breaking things, which upset her mother greatly. That didn’t make sense to Pansy, because it wasn’t like her mother was the one who had to clean up messes. Usually Lichen did.

She’d turned her tutor's hair green once; the talk of La Serpens, she  had outraged everyone, even people whose opinion Pansy hadn't known she needed to care for. Lichen had laughed about it later, saying that it suited the tutor much better, being the ogre that she was.

If she could break glasses and change people’s appearance, surely she could create light purposefully. If only long enough to climb down a tree.

Suddenly, Pansy found herself sitting upon the grass. She yelped with surprise, and fell over sideways. She was on the ground.

Even she knew that was impressive magic. The faster she ran, the faster the monsters did too. As they breathed down her neck, she sprinted back up to the house.

She bursted into the parlour. Her feet hit the green rug and the banitreu charm screeched through the house. Pansy sobbed, cowering on the floor as the protection charm shook the rafters and light fixtures swayed.

It felt like an eternity later, the alarm was gone. Silence pervaded, ringing loudly in her ears. She was too scared to look up, didn’t want to see the look on her father’s face that she—

“Miss Parkinson.”

It was only Hirsute. She climbed to her feet, sniffling and wiping tears from her face. 

“What is Miss Parkinson doing out of bed?” 

She shivered, the cold night having seeped into her bones. Had no one noticed? “I’m looking for Lichen.”

“Lichen is gone. You should be knowing that, Miss Parkinson.”

Pansy’s brow furrowed. “Where has she gone?” Lichen had never gone on holiday before—she always said she didn’t need one. That she would miss her darling Pansy too much to go away that long. (It was a secret that Lichen addressed her as darling Pansy, one that she was more than happy to keep if it meant she kept hearing it. No one else called her anything so sweet.)

Even at six, Pansy recognised the look Hirsute gave her as disgust. “Away. Lichen is not coming back.”

“Away where?” She was actually panicking now—she’d been upset and resentful before, but willing to forgive. Now she was scared, more than she had been of the dark, nearly as much as she had been of her father and his punishment for setting off the alarm that shook the whole house. “What do you mean she’s not coming back?”

“Miss Parkinson will have to ask Mistress or Master Parkinson,” Hirsute said shortly. She apparated, a loud crack that made Pansy flinch hard enough that she almost fell over. Suddenly alone in the hallway dimly lit by wall sconces, the shadows writhed and stretched to grab at her ankles.

With no Lichen to help her, Pansy slept in her dress that night. Hirsute tutted at her when she came to wake her in the morning. “Miss Parkinson is so useless that she cannot even take off her own clothing,” the elf muttered as she undid the buttons lined down the back of Pansy's dress.

It sunk into her skin, through to her heart. Useless. There was no Lichen to whisper counter arguments in her ear.

In retrospect, it was obvious why it happened. Her parents never hid their distaste for the way Pansy spoke positively about her nanny elf. Her childhood memory is hazy, didn’t link together the sequence of events until she was eleven-ish. 

By then she’d seen the way the Malfoy’s treated their elves and had felt strongly enough to say something about it. “Some elves don’t know discipline,” her mother said. “Take Lichen for example.”

Her question came too fast to be proper; “What about Lichen?” They’d never talked about it—Pansy had seen her parents for meals after the tree incident but was too embarrassed about the fact that she had spent half the night stuck up a tree to bring up the question of where her favourite elf was. 

Foolishly, she hoped it was a holiday. She spent so long hoping, imagining Lichen sunbathing and swimming, that it became true.

“She stepped out of line. She knew what she was doing.”

“Is she dead?” Pansy had demanded. If she focused on being angry, she wouldn’t puke all over the floor.

“You’ll have to ask your father,” her mother replied. “I didn’t want to know the details, but you’re free to find out if you so wish.”

She had gagged, then.

She was not about to ask Irving Parkinson, the man who didn’t have time to look at his daughter in the eye unless it was to make a complaint, where her nanny elf went to. She did have nightmares that night though. Stuck in a tree, unable to help Lichen when she needed it the most.

✦

Pansy hasn’t dreamt of Lichen in years. There was no one to talk about it with—Draco had always said elves existed to serve wizards and claimed there wasn’t anything else worth while thinking about them. When she tried to ask about his nanny elf he had shrugged and said there were so many, he couldn’t remember their names. Pansy didn’t believe him.

She has to remember Lichen. To forget her for her own protection was too selfish for her to bear. There is a tree planted in her mind, a tall black cherry tree that provides shade and hides the more dangerous flora from view.

It had been a nice dream this time, Lichen had been brushing her hair and saying something nasty about her tutor. It was the one from when she was ten, whom Lichen had never met. She would smack the backs of Pansy’s hand with her wand every time she made an error on the piano.

It had turned not nice, when Pansy begged Lichen to stay and Lichen had left anyway.

Checking behind the curtains and out the window, the world outside is the darkest shade of blue—dawn is soon, but not soon enough. She shifts on her way down the hallway, landing smoothly onto four legs.

Ron’s door looks shut and she almost panics. But it’s not latched, moving freely when she nudges it open just far enough for her small body to slip through. She jumps up onto the bed where he lays, his breaths deep and heavy. His cheeks are dry, his brow unfurrowed. Perhaps only one of them has to endure a nasty dream at a time. She likes the idea that she could do that for him.

It’s difficult, trying to get under covers without hands. As if sensing her there, he rolls over, and she can slip beneath the covers and settle herself against his shoulder, her head beside his on the pillow. She closes her eyes and starts to purr, thinking of anything other than the fate of her darling elf, Lichen.

Chapter Text

Pansy really doesn’t know what Ron sees in Padma Patil. She’s so quiet, always sitting in the common room with her nose in a book. Different to Granger, who inhales books only to lift her head to explain everything she’s ever known to anyone nearby with ears who doesn’t have the foresight to walk away while they still have the chance.

No, Padma reads and reads and keeps all of the thoughts she accumulates to herself. Pansy’s running theory is that it’s because she secretly doesn’t have anything interesting to say.

She’s studious in the kind of way that Pansy hates. She studies and the information actually goes in, if her high marks are anything to go by. People respect what she has to say, turn their heads and listen when she speaks, as if every word is worth something. 

Pansy doesn’t think that’s special—it’s a natural outcome of not speaking much. Perhaps Pansy needs to work on being more mysterious, and people would treat her the same. She’s never been very good at keeping her mouth shut when her thoughts are so loud.

Now that she knows to look for it, Pansy’s caught Ron watching her. In class, his eyes linger on Padma longer than necessary. He made a joke in Transfiguration yesterday and glanced over to see if she’d heard. Across the dining hall, he smiled at her over some joke Pansy wasn’t privy to; Pansy felt strangled from the inside, her throat compressing down on itself. How dare they.

Padma doesn’t know Ron like Pansy does. She hasn’t seen him cry. She hasn’t sat with him through the tears, curled closer to him, felt the beat of his heart as he grieved. Padma doesn’t deserve to know Ron like Pansy knows Ron.

Not to mention, her hair is awfully frizzy.

“Why are we staring out the Patil twins?”

Pansy breaks out of her reverie, shifting her gaze to focus on Daphne.

“We’re not.” She looks down at the crystal ball on the desk between them and gazes into it as if she had been doing so all along.

“Very convincing,” Daphne says, over enunciating the syllables.

Pansy kicks her under the desk. 

“Ow.”

No matter how long Pansy stares, how hard she tries to empty her mind and keep it that way, the pale grey haze within the crystal ball remains. Clarity remains elusive. 

It doesn’t bode well for Trelawney's assessment. Pansy scratches down vague illusions to a future in hopes that Trelawney will reward her for trying. She’s the sort of professor who appreciates it, who won’t tell you that your answers might be wrong; it keeps Pansy’s head above water when she’s otherwise academically drowning.

1. Deep in the forest, a ferocious beast prowls

2. A white knight will sweep in at the rescue  Rain comes on Tuesday

3. The cat who gets the cream will   no one sees when the princess bleeds

✦

Pansy never speaks up in class—whenever she thinks she has the right idea, is holding it like something tangible in her mind until it’s heavy on the tip of her tongue, someone else answers first and her answer is tipped over on its head; incorrect, all along. As if she's just too short sighted to see it.

It’s hard not to though, when Granger cannot fathom being wrong, and Ron is the one she’s blindly arguing with.

“Mione, will you just bloody listen for two seconds? My mum never cast it as a maxima, it’s just too complex with seven kids in the house. There are other ward charms around the perimeter of the house that are much better than what is essentially a booby trap.”

“Why wouldn’t you just do both? If you really cared about protecting your house from intruders, then you would cast both.”

“Ron’s right," Pansy blurts. “A regular banitreu charm is better suited to a home living situation than banitreu maxima.”

“But the theory states that banitreu maxima provides the highest level of security and—” Granger starts.

Draco leans back in his chair, balancing on the back legs. He doesn’t bother joining in, just watches Granger work herself up.

“And what happens when you have kids in the house that don’t know about the charm and they start crying from the caterwauling element? Or get strung up to the ceiling from the incarcerous? You have to think of the real life applications, not just the theory.”

Pansy thinks she does exceedingly well on keeping emotion out of her voice. She’s read ahead in the textbook, yes, but it’s childhood memories, fuzzy around the edges but vivid at the center, that made the information stick in her mind.  Small, bony feet hitting freezing hardwood floor, giving way to the screech of the caterwauling alarm. 

Intruder, intruder. 

Get out, get out, 

you do not 

belong here. 

It took six months at Hogwarts before she risked a midnight trip to the bathroom, and that had only been because she had a stomach ache and didn’t feel confident in vanishing the vomit from her sheets. 

Hogwarts lulled her into a sense of security she hadn’t ever experienced before, inevitably leading to mistakes. The summer after first year, she climbed out of bed for a glass of water. Muscle memory belatedly kicked in when her feet met hardwood floors instead of the thick rug next to her dormitory bed and she fell to the floor, expecting a piercing alarm to wake the whole house. 

She lay on the floor panting, covered in a layer of sweat that chilled in the permeating silence. Sometime between six and twelve years of age, her parents had figured out how to adjust the charm—she didn’t know whether it was that they suddenly uncovered the additional effort that had been lacking thus far in Pansy’s existence to cast a more complex spell, or that they stopped casting it as a maxima, concerned by the idea of anything scaring their perfect gemino boys.

She was older still, fifteen, before she thought of the potential years she spent fearing an invisible monster, not knowing that it no longer hung over her as she slept, because her parents had never bothered to tell her.

“I don’t have children,” Granger replies smartly.

“Crookshanks?” Pansy shoots back.

Granger’s cheeks pinken, she flips over a page in her text book. “Well, you should able to incorporate biological markers—”

“For children, maybe, but pets are a whole different biology. That level of magic isn’t attainable for all witches.”

“I’m sure it’s not that difficult, with the benefits it would provide.” Her finger pressed to the page, Granger skims for the evidence to prove her correctness.

“We’re not all Hermione Granger,” Pansy says bitterly. No matter how much she practices her charms, she doubts she could confidently cast an anti-intruder charm in the hypothetical situation of having a child in the house.

“Ten points to Slytherin,” Flitwick announces. Pansy frowns to herself—shouldn’t Ron get points, when it was his correct answer she was backing up?

Class ends, chairs scrap against the stone floors, books shoved into bags. A looming presence at Pansy’s back.

She holds back the flinch of surprise that it’s Ron and not literally anyone else. Her breath catches on something in her lungs—hope.

It’s crushed as soon as he speaks; “I don’t need you to fight my arguments for me.”

“It was a class discussion.”

A muscle in his jaw flutters as he clenches his teeth. “It’s like you think we’re friends or something.”

She opens her mouth to argue—of course they’re not friends. All she did was agree with his point of view, which Granger wouldn’t understand, growing up with locks on the doors and no other protection—

“I know you don’t have many of those, but in case you didn’t realise, I don’t exactly have a shortage.”

Pansy’s jaw clicks shut. Her cheeks are burning, she thinks of ice. She is a tower, impenetrable.

His verbal hex landed as planned—how long had he spent thinking up the most horrible thing to say to her?—he shows her his back and walks away. 

She hates how her mind goes blank around him, her natural snappy instincts evaporated. She turns the conversation over in her mind as she walks alone to Muggle Studies. The argument with Granger had filled her with fire, a riling, burgeoning warmth—she wanted to read ahead more and more until she was chapters, leagues, ahead of Granger. Until she was correcting her at every turn, even if the Muggle-born witch was better at actually casting the charms than Pansy was. 

Now, she feels ill, replaying the shape of the words in her mouth until they taste sour. Ron would have had his lip curled with disgust. Would have been thinking shut up, Godrics sake. And then, why is she so obsessed with me?

She should just give up. Ron doesn’t want to be friends. He doesn’t even want to give her a chance to change his preconceived opinions of her. If head kisses as a cat are all she can get from him—she can settle for that. She will. It’ll be easier on her heart, already fragile and made of glass, to just avoid him when she isn’t in her animagus form. She’s never craved someone’s attention as much as his, but it’s not worth it when it’s unkind. He’s only sweet to her when he's unaware.

✦

It takes him a few minutes before he notices her, tucked under the bed. “Why are you down there, darling?”

He crouches, and extends his arm. Rubbing his fingers together, he clicks his tongue in encouragement. Tentatively, she stands and steps out from beneath the shelter of his bedframe.

“Did you get in a fight with Crookshanks or something?” he asks, scratching down her back. She looks up at him, this giant of a boy above her with a head of flames, but she isn’t afraid.

Then his hands are wrapped around her, airborne for a brief moment, and then cradled against his chest. The knot of anxiety in her gut loosens.

“I thought you were smarter than that,” he says. “I’ll have a word with Hermione.”

Pansy chirps, the best kind of response she can make. She wishes she could tell Ron that Crookshanks is her friend, that he should give the fierce orange beast a chance.

“You want to come sit with me?” he asks, as if she would ever say no, and walks over to the bed. He sits down gently, arranges himself to lean back against his headboard and pillows so that she remains against his chest. 

Close like this, his skin smells salty sweet, caramel. She imagines licking him but doesn’t. That would be too weird of her. Licking cream off his fingers was already strange enough.

She stays there, tucked up beneath his chin, as he practices charming an unused teabag into a small brown mouse. It’s what Pansy should be doing, really; practicing for their Transfiguration practical instead of sleeping on Ron’s chest.

If things don’t work out once her time at Hogwarts has run out (because of her inevitably terrible N.E.W.T.’s), maybe she’ll just spend the rest of her life as a cat, following around Ronald Weasley. He doesn’t seem like he’d mind too much.

✦

“Whose cat is that?” Padma Patil asks. 

“I guess she’s kind of mine.” Ron reaches down and pats her head. Pansy purrs. She’s always wanted to belong to someone. 

Ron picks her up, Pansy lets it happen. “No one else has claimed her.” Pansy smooshes her face up under his jaw and he scratches beneath her chin in reciprocation.

“Aw she’s sweet.”

“Yeah,” Ron says, something vulnerable colouring his voice that Pansy wouldn’t have anticipated.

Padma reaches to pet her. Pansy hisses and shows her teeth—she’s practiced it in the mirror and knows it looks quite fierce.

“Don’t worry, sweetheart, I won’t let Padma kick you out like Hermione did.”

“Does Hermione spend a lot of time in your room?” Padma asks. Ron seems to miss the suspicious look she sweeps over the room, as if searching for evidence of another girl’s presence.

There is another girl here, Pansy thinks. Right in front of you. So get out.

Pansy gets put back down, on the floor rather than the bed. Padma is slipping closer to Ron, and he’s not telling her to stop. They’re on the bed, hidden from Pansy’s view. She jumps up onto it, forces herself between them.

“Sweetheart, no,” Ron chastens.

“Can’t you kick her out?” Padma asks.

“I don’t want her to get mad at me,” he says even as he pushes her away.

Pansy knows if she keeps getting in the way, eventually Padma will decide the endeavour of making out with Ron is too difficult, and she’ll leave, and it will just be Ron and Pansy again, as it should be.

“Not now!” Ron shoves her away again. “Gods, cats are stupid, aren’t they?”

Pansy suddenly feels terrible. Is that really what he thinks? That she’s stupid?

Yes. Ron thinks sweetheart the cat is stupid. He thinks Pansy the girl is evil incarnate. Ron would rather make out with a Padma Patil than spend all of his time with a stray cat. He would laugh if Pansy the girl was pushed down the stairs.

Yes. Pansy the girl is stupid.

Sweetheart the cat jumps off the bed and draws a straight line to the bedroom door, still slightly ajar.

“Thank Merlin,” Padma says, a grin in her voice. “Now, come here.”

The door clicks shut behind her.

Sweetheart the cat slips into the Slytherin girls dorm room, jumps into the bed belonging to a witch no one likes. Shifts into a girl shaped thing named Pansy Parkinson, and hides from her embarrassment beneath the covers. 

Chapter Text

“You haven’t been hanging out with us for weeks,” Blaise says.

“I didn’t know you cared so much,” she says sweetly, batting her lashes at him. He’s already cast a muffliato, so she’s wary of where this conversation leads. She would prefer to focus on the repotting they’ve been assigned for class.

“We are friends, Pans.”

“Are you sure you’re not hiding something deeper? This sounds like the beginning of some kind of confession.”

“It isn’t,” he says shortly, and then lets it sit there. As if he needs to really make sure she doesn’t think he’s about to confess his undying love for her. She rolls her eyes—she’d been joking obviously.

“Draco told me he had to let you in in the middle of the night because you’d locked yourself out.”

Pansy scowls and digs her fingers into the dirt, headless of it working its way beneath her nails. Draco had placed a cup of milk in front of her the morning after at breakfast—she should have threatened him then and there.

She makes the mistake of looking up and Blaise blinks at her, waiting for her to confirm or deny. But he didn’t ask an actual question, so she’s not going to provide him with any answers.

“I’ve seen you sneaking into Weasley’s room,” Blaise says, mirth dancing in his eyes.

“No you haven’t,” she states, her eyes drilling into his. As if denial is the latest fashion.

The corner of his mouth quirks in a grin. “Promise to study with us tonight and I won’t tell Draco or Daphne.”

She narrows her eyes at him.

“At least three times a week,” he quickly amends before she can agree before he’s stated all his terms.

She gives a beleaguered sigh. “Fine.” She needs to study anyway. “But Draco can’t bring Granger, I’d have to gouge my eyes out. And hex my ears off.”

Blaise shoves his trowel into the soil. “I’m afraid I can’t control where Granger does and does not go. If she does show up, she’s a good study partner.”

Pansy rolls her eyes. “Yes, I’m sure lecturing people gets her rocks off. Works to Draco’s benefit.”

He raises his brows thoughtfully before his attention snags. It’s Luna Lovegood, twiddling her dirt-flecked fingers at him from across the glass house. Ugh.

Pansy sets her focus on repotting the dittany, sick of watching all of her friends fall in love right in front of her. The jealousy makes her feel injurious—towards herself and others.

✦

“There’s safety in numbers,” Blaise says, returning to the conversation as if he never left it. Pansy glances up from her note taking, smudges of dirt across the page from her soil encrusted skin.

“At the library,” he says again.

Her eyes narrow to slits, a warning.

“I overheard some Gryffindorks saying—”

Was this some kind of intervention? “I said I’d be there,” Pansy snaps. “And you did not seriously just say Gryffindorks. What are you, fourteen?”

He does that smile of his with only his eyes, more cat like than she ever is in human form.

“Whatever you heard, it doesn’t matter,” she mutters.

“We’ll go after tea tonight, then?”

“Fine. Will Lovegood be there?”

Blaise is silent. She looks up to see him suddenly busying himself with note taking.

“Did you not hear me?” she asks, her volume increasing. “I asked, will Love—”

“Salazar, shut up,” he hisses, glancing over to Lovegood. The witch is staring at her dittany plant with a glazed over look on her face; too away with the fairies to ever realise she’s being talked about. “Okay,” Blaise relents, “we’re even.”

Pansy smiles to herself and returns to her notes.

✦

Pansy attends the library study session like fulfilling a sentence. As soon as the two hours are up, she packs up her books and leaves.

Straight up to the eighth year turret, streaming through the common room to the Slytherin girls dorm to strip off her clothes and shift. She stretches, front legs straight in front of her and back arched. It’s better than any stretch she could achieve in girl form, paradoxically helping her to feel more like a person.

Clothes and classwork combined are left in a disorganised heap on her bed as she trots off down the hall to where she wished she had been all evening.

“Where have you been?” Ron asks, fondly rather than admonishing. “I was worried your third year girl had stolen you back.”

No, just held hostage by my friends.

She leaps up onto the bed and basks in his attention like he’s the sun. 

Ron returns to his book, Pansy climbs up onto his stomach to be closer. “Hey, I can’t see if you sit there.”

Pansy tucks herself further up his chest, beneath his chin.

“Sometimes, I feel like you can understand me,” he muses.

He’s reading about the Goblin Wars, she reads a bit along with him until he finishes the chapter and puts the book down.

Ron manoeuvres her off of him, a slow slide onto the bed that’s more gentle than anyone’s ever handled her. He heads over to his wardrobe and then pulls off his shirt. Pansy gets caught up staring at the expanse of his shoulders, how wide they are before narrowing down to his waist. And then he’s turning around to face her and she gets an eyeful of his abs, as well. 

“I hope you’re not secretly a thirty year old man.”

A confused meow escapes Pansy’s mouth before she can stop it—she’s too surprised by the suggestion.

“Back in third year, I had this pet rat.” He pulls on a sleep shirt, faded black with the words The Cure printed across the chest; she’s mildly disappointed to have to squint to see his outline, now. “Turned out he was Peter Pettigrew. You probably never met him, you seem too young. And your third year girl wouldn’t have been at school yet. But Peter—he was an animagus. Literally spent years sleeping in my bed, and it turned out the whole time, he was in with Voldemort!” He shudders at the memory.

Pansy can’t help the way she flinches.

Ron frowns and Pansy panics further—has she just given herself away entirely? What kind of fucking cat flinches at someone’s name? He takes a step towards her, Pansy scrambles back on the bed away from him. Her thoughts aren’t processing coherently.

“I’m sorry,” Ron says softly. “It was probably scary here last year.”

He pats her until her heart rate has gone back to normal—for a cat, anyway (much faster than when she’s a girl).

Ron narrows his eyes at her in thought. “See, this is why I think you can understand me. Is it just a cat thing? Hermione’s convinced Crookshanks can understand her, but that’s because he’s half kneazle. Don’t tell her I admitted that though.”

He continues petting her a while, spread out on the bed on his stomach, chin propped up on his palm. “It’s probably too unlikely,” he says thoughtfully. “I can’t befriend an animal twice and have it turn out to be an adult man both times, can I? That would just be crazy.”

This line of conversation is making Pansy feel horrendously guilty. She’s not a thirty year old man, but is she much better? Ron would hate her even more than he already does if he were ever to find out that his sweetheart is Pansy Parkinson.

Her body isn’t big enough to feel this nasty of an emotion, it feels all consuming, like she’s being eaten from the inside out and it won’t take long for her to be disintegrated entirely.

Ron sits up abruptly, having apparently decided something in his head without speaking it out loud. And why should he? She’s just a cat. 

As he changes into his pyjama bottoms, Pansy does her best effort to not look at his bare legs, not even for a second. (Penance, for last time.) 

“You probably won’t be here when I get back, will you.”

She meows again, her only way of speaking to him in any way.

She follows him to the door, can feel his eyes on her as she slips down the hallway. She feels paranoid and gross, as discombobulated and disorganised as an inky, messy scribble, like he can see right through her and knows she’s a liar.

“Night, sweetheart,” he calls after her.

Chapter Text

The literature surrounding animagi, limited as it is, claims that a person's animagus form is inherent to who they are as a person. Although she’d had few experiences with cats before turning into one herself (Milicent’s tabby Checkers being the only cat she’d known in an up-close kind of way, seeing as her parents weren't the type to indulge having animals in the house), Pansy believes it. Shifting to a cat for the first time unlocked a deeper understanding that hadn’t been accessible before, like her heart had a false bottom. It was a feeling of instinct and knowledge that she knew without having to cross-check with any book that she could trust.

It means she knows, without needing to look back, when she is being followed.

She cuts off to the left abruptly, not wanting to lead them to the library where she can be cornered against the stacks while they laugh and sneer at her.

They’re a year below her, don’t they have classes to attend right now? Her steps are quick, borderline rushed, as she carves a path all the way down the castle, directed as if she has somewhere to go. 

She breaks free into open air, striding through the courtyard.

“Oi, princess,” a voice yells out at her. 

She can’t help herself from glancing back. Peakes and Cootes are following her, as well as a third friend of theirs, Craigleith. He’s skinnier than the other two, but she’s still not happy to see him. He spat at her once. She was sure Professor Vector had seen it, but Arithmancy teacher hadn’t intervened.

Pansy’s attention catches on something above the three boys—a broad figure, orange hair passing through the balcony corridor above the courtyard. He pauses when he sees them and suddenly she can’t turn back around, can’t focus on leaving.

 “Where you off to?” Peakes asks her.

“Not allowed off school grounds, is she,” Cootes says.

Ron leans his forearms over the top flat of the half wall, like watching a spectacle. Does he find this entertaining?

“Well?” Peakes demands.

“You’re not my keeper,” she snaps. A droplet of rain lands on her cheek, the first in a slow onset of drizzle.

“It shouldn’t be that hard to tell us where you’re going if you’re not up to anything.”

“I have a study period.” She hates herself for giving in, providing some kind of explanation.

“Funny, us too.” Craigleith grins.

Movement on the balcony. She barely catches Seamus Finnegan’s words, huffed and out of breath. An apology, maybe.

“S’all good, let’s go.” 

“See ya, Weasley,” Peakes calls up to him.

Ron hikes his bag up higher on his shoulder, flicks his hand in a wave, and leaves. Abandoning her in a courtyard with three idiotic Gryffindors who think they’re vigilante heroes. They probably think Ron has given them his blessing to antagonise her. Maybe he has.

This was karma, for all those years she spent coming up with the nastiest thing to say. For laughing when Draco hexed Granger’s teeth. For mocking Ron’s lack of wealth when the home she had to return to once term ended suffered from a different kind of lacking.

With Ron gone, her self preservation returns. Peakes and co. can’t be reasoned with, they weren’t worth the breath in her lungs.

She turns, begins to walk away, her movements stiff as she tries to restrain herself from running. A stinging jinx lands on the exposed flesh of her calf. She stumbles, but keeps going. The boys are muttering amongst themselves, but her ears are ringing too loudly.

“Hey, we’re still speaking to you,” Cootes calls out. A jelly legs curse and she’s falling to her knees, reopening old wounds.

The rain is coming down properly now. She tries to stand and is pushed back to the ground by a firm pressure at her back that won’t be argued with. Her own wand is in her pocket—useless, because she can’t cast anything that doesn’t pass as school related. If she cast anything defensive, anything as dark as she wishes, she’d be in Azkaban next month.

“You can do it,” Peakes nudges Craigleith. “You did it to that wild rabbit easy.”

Craigleith grips his wand tighter, sets his jaw.

“It’s justice,” Cookes hisses. “Just do it.”

Fuck.

Fuck, fuck, fuck, they’re actually going to use the Cruciatus on her. She’s already shaking just at the prospect, like her bones are preparing for the onset. The last time was—was before the war ended. Alecto had punished her for trying to go easy on a second year kid, had made up for where her Crucio lacked.

She doesn’t think Craigleith will go easy on her.

Rain gets in her eyes as she stares up at him, grits her teeth as she breathes in deep through her nose. She’s survived this before, she can survive again. Escaping by shifting isn’t an option—ammunition for blackmail or imprisonment, it’s not worth revealing herself.

“Torpere maxima.” The spell hits her in the chin and she yelps, despite wanting to maintain a cool demeanour. Her tongue stings, she can taste blood. All along her jaw, pain radiates.

Cootes makes a noise of impatience.

Craigleith shakes out his hand. “I’m just warming up.”

She sees him before they do, although her eyesight is narrowing as her face swells. She wonders how he knew to come out here, in the rain, why he doesn’t seem surprised to find her like this.

His voice is low and measured; “What the fuck do you shit-for-brains actually think you’re doing?” 

Craigleith keeps his wand trained on Pansy while the other two spin to face Blaise, wands raised.

Blaise’s pitch black eyes bore into hers. “Go.”

Her lips are resistant to cooperate, swollen as they are, but she still tries; “I can’t—”

“Go. I’ll take care of them.”

This, this is what makes Pansy want to cry. To have someone to take care of the problem for her, to take care of her. She shifts, clothes and all, and bolts.

✦

Running through the underbrush, she panics anew. Did she do the wrong thing, leaving Blaise to face three antagonistic wizards alone? He was under the same limitations as her, monthly wand checks and legilimency searches at the smallest provocation. He always flew just under the radar, was noncommittal during the whole join-the-Dark-Lord fad that swept up the rest of them, but no Slytherin got away with avoiding casting Crucios against younger students without receiving severe punishments themselves. Blaise was just as self preserving as the rest of them.

She’s slipping through the forest in an attempt to make herself feel better, but the anxiety isn’t fading. Her head is too messy to even attempt to bury such fresh memories. Shifting had helped slightly with her injuries, but her left eye is still swollen shut.

Her go-to strategy for stress relief a fail, she makes her way back up to the castle. Tentatively, she creeps back through the courtyard. The dirt over stone still shows evidence of multiple feet, smudges of a body falling. The schoolwork she had dropped and left behind is gone. 

Her study period likely over by now, Pansy makes the academically questionable choice of skipping Transfiguration. 

His door has been left open; it always is now. There’s only one place she wants to be, and she can’t lift bedsheets with her hands. She shifts back to a (soaking wet) girl, climbs beneath his duvet, and shifts back to a cat, curled up in a tight, shivering circle. 

✦

“Eugh, you got my sheets all gross!” 

At his vitriol, Pansy buries herself deeper within the sheets.

“Hey, I didn’t mean—” Ron ducks his head beneath the blankets, leaning down on his elbows.

She eyes him, knowing she can see better than he can in the darkness the duvet has created. Gently, he smooths his hand over her head and down her back. “Jeez, you’re soaking. Did you get caught out in the rain? That’s no good, is it. I can see why you wanted to get in bed.”

Pansy wishes forgiveness was always granted so easily.

“If you come out, I’ll cast a drying charm on you. You’ll feel much better, I promise.”

He shifts his hand to scritch under her chin, she leans into his touch. She doesn’t have much interest in leaving this cave, not when he’s here, too.

“I’ve still got the can of cream, too, if you want.” He grins. “I saw that look on your face. Come on.” He holds the blankets up, forming a tunnel out to the light.

“Your eye looks sore, what happened?” With a finger beneath her chin, he tilts her face up. “Was that Crookshanks?” he asks, the genuine anger in his voice surprising her.

 The image of him walking away, leaving her to face Peakes, Cootes, and Craigleith alone, replays in her mind. He wouldn’t be angry if he knew the truth.

“You don’t have to try protect him just because he’s a fellow cat,” Ron says, looking at her seriously. Then he shakes his head. “What am I doing, you can’t actually understand me…” Moving to get his spray can of cream out from his bedside table, he murmurs, “I’ll have to ask Hermione about cat healing charms.”

Ron feeds her cream from the tips of his fingers, and then casts the drying spell when she’s not paying attention. Her fur puffs up and he laughs at her, but she doesn’t mind.

He runs his hand over her fur, smoothing it back down. “Much better,” he says. “I already tried telling Hermione to tell Crookshanks to stop bothering you. She didn’t believe me, of course. She never does when it comes to that bloody cat.”

Pansy curls up on his ribs, can feel the rise and fall of his breaths, and almost falls asleep, lulled by the pressure of Ron’s hand smoothing down her coat over and over.

A knock on the door, and she’s immediately alert again. “Careful,” Ron murmurs, guiding her claws away from his shirt.

Granger pokes her head inside. “You coming? We’re heading down now.” Her eyes fall on Pansy for a brief moment, and then she looks back to Ron. Pansy waits for the admonishment about stealing a third year girl’s cat.

“Yeah, just a minute.”

Granger nods and then leaves, snicking the door shut behind her.

Ron sits up slowly, gently moving Pansy to the side. “You can stay here if you want, I’ll bring you back a dessert.” It’s a nice sentiment, but she can’t live off sweets eaten as a cat. Plus, she needs to make sure Blaise is alright.

His thumb caresses her head again and she closes her eyes, wishing she had the magic to pause the moment to last forever. Ron leans down, sets a kiss between her ears, and then his touch is gone. She watches as he shoves on his slides—they’re horrific to look at and Pansy hates them but he seems inexplicably in love with them, wearing them whenever he’s not required to be in uniform. Laziness over aesthetic. They thwap against his heels as he leaves the room, she can hear it all the way down the hall.

✦

“Is everything okay?” Pansy hisses urgently, sliding into the vacant seat next to Blaise.

“With me?” Blaise gets a look at her, his eyes widen in shock. “Fuck, have you looked in a mirror?”

Pansy tugs her hair further over her face. “Didn’t have time.”

“I can’t believe you didn’t let me know how bad it was.”

“It’s fine,” she mutters, scooping potatoes and peas onto her plate in an effort to signal an end to this line of conversation.

“It’s not fine, they were going to use an Unforgivable on you. Have they, before?”

“No,” she says shortly, finally meeting his eyes. “Do I need to worry about them knowing about me now? What did you do to them?”

“What’s happened?” Daphne asks, having sat down across from them. “Salazar, what happened to your face?”

“Nothing,” Pansy says, unable to help herself from tracing the edge of her jaw, wincing at the tenderness. “Blaise.”

“That part is actually fine,” he says. “Granger obliviated them for me.”

“What?” She sets her fork down with a clunk that would have earned her a furious glare from her mother.

“She’s ace at memory spells. I didn’t want to risk them figuring it out if I tried removing the memory—I didn’t know you were going to shift in front of them.”

“That doesn’t sound like nothing,” Daphne says slowly, watching them closely.

“You told me to go!”

“Yes, but—nevermind.” He shakes his head. “It’s sorted.”

“You don’t think she’ll tell—” Ron. 

Blaise waves a hand. “She loves Draco, Draco loves you, she won’t tell anyone.”

“Are you sure?”

“I didn’t actually invite myself to the conversation, no. Have some faith, will you? We’re all here to help protect you.”

Pansy rolls her eyes, suddenly feeling moody and overheated. “Whatever. I didn’t ask for your help anyway. Next time, just stay out of it.”

Blaise laughs dryly. “I’m obviously not going to do that. Where are you going? You just got here.”

“Stop coddling me,” she snaps. “Don’t follow me this time.” If she doesn’t leave, she’s going to cry in front of them. Something ugly and snotty and angry.

“You need to eat dinner, Pans,” Daphne calls after her, but she’s already gone. Walking fast enough to let out some of the heat she feels inside. 

Maybe she’ll sneak into the kitchens, once she’s calmed down. She befriended an elf a few years ago who reminded her of Lichen, but then she’d died in the war. For those who remain, she’s settled for threats of self-ironed hands over kinship, forcing them to swear to keep her animagus status a secret. It would be easy to slip into the kitchens as a cat and then shift into a girl to eat. Easier than enduring a dinner with her friends where they all look at her sideways and beat around asking her whether she’s okay or not. Acting as if they’re suddenly available to help her, when they never have been before.

Chapter Text

“You played really well today,” Granger tries to burgeon Ron’s stormy mood.

“He lost,” Pansy says. She didn’t see the point in pandering.

Ron looks at her sidelong. “Thanks,” he bites out. “I’m aware.”

“I just meant—”

He storms off ahead before she can finish.

“Don’t take it to heart,” Granger murmurs. “He’s a sore loser.” 

Pansy frowns at her to say why would I care?, panicked at the idea that somehow Granger has seen through her terrible attempts with Ron to some kind of truth. 

Her entire life is a façade. Beneath all the layers, no one knows how small she is. Lucky for Pansy, the depths of her own soul are easy to direct her gaze away from.

She trails behind the group back up to the eighth year turret, the separation stretching until she’s barely associated with the cluster at all.

Ravenclaw had made eleven separate goals—the higher the number reached, the poorer Ron played. Clearly, he couldn’t handle failing with an audience.

Pansy couldn’t either, that’s why she didn’t play quidditch. (Aside from the rain and mud, physical exertion, and long stretches of boredom.) It was questionable why Ron chose such a visible, important position in the field as the Keeper—it was much safer to not try at all, to only try in private.

She’d watched him miss shot after shot, his cheeks reddening, his expression a scowl. Chewed on her lip as the Ravenclaws made their way down the pitch towards the hoops he guarded for the seventh time. She’d never watched a game so closely, not since fifth year when she was in love with Draco.

There was a messy, heavy feeling in her chest when the match ended, watching Ron fly directly back down to solid ground, frustration in his every movement as he swung off his broom.

She doesn’t realise she’s following Ron until he reaches the threshold of his bedroom and turns around to face her. She has to stop abruptly to avoid walking face first into his chest.

“Do you want something?”

Attention, she thinks and hates herself for it.

“I stink and I’m knackered, I just want to shower and have a nap before tea.”

“Right. Sorry.”

He raises his brows impatiently. “So? What do you want?”

“Oh. Nothing.”

He sighs and rolls his eyes. “Fuck off then, won’t you?” He draws the door shut in her face.

Sorry? she mouths to herself. She’s really lost it, full fledged pathetic. Behaving like one of his third year fangirls.

He’d all but confirmed he would be in bed soon. Guaranteed affection. Cuddles were a gateway drug.

Instead of shifting and going to wait for him on the bed, she forces herself to gather her books and take a purposeful, direct route to the library. It’s near empty, not even Granger is here. Alone, as well as lonely. She doesn’t let herself wonder if Ron is missing his sweetheart.

Chapter Text

If Pansy allows it, she and Ron occasionally end up in the same social situation. It’s an unfortunate consequence of Draco simping after Granger. 

“Do you have a favourite opening?” Pansy asks.

Ron barely glances up at her, just a flick of his eyes, confused as to why she’s even speaking to him, and then back to the match he’s playing against Theo.

She’d nicked a chess theory book from his bedroom floor, thinking it would provide insight into what made him tick. A few different chapters had been dog eared, but trying to parse through the seemingly redundant and random code names for everything was like reading an alternative version of English. She didn’t have enough time to learn the lexicon on top of her classwork and she’d always been more of a hands-on learner, so asking him a question was the next logical step. What man didn’t enjoy over explaining their niche interest to a woman?

“Mine’s the French defense,” Theo says.

Pansy shifts her gaze to glare at him. 

He wiggles his brows at her. “It’s sexy.”

“Just because something’s French doesn’t make it inherently sexy,” Pansy deadpans.

Ron’s not paying any attention to their repartee, instead smoothly directly a chess piece across the board. It stands alone in its square, not knocking any of Theo’s white pieces over. Perhaps he's playing the long game.

Quidditch and now fucking chess. What had she turned into, some insipid witch who tailored her personality to the hobbies and interests of a boy she liked?

“Your turn, Nott.”

“I heard the Evans Gambit is good for aggressive game play,” Pansy tries again. Whatever aggressive can mean in a board game.

“If you want the game to be over quickly,” Ron says shortly, as if only an idiot would want this kind of outcome. Did playing aggressively mean losing…?

“I didn’t know you had an interest in chess,” Daphne muses.

Pansy leans back from the board. “I don’t.” 

Daphne raises a thin, plucked brow at her.

“Pansy prefers gobstones,” Theo chimes in.

“I do not—” Instead of continuing to argue and thus dig herself into a hole, Pansy stands abruptly.

“Fetch me a drink, will you love? I’m running low.” Theo lifts his empty glass tumbler to waggle it in the air at her, a drop of whiskey gleaming at the bottom. Pansy ignores it, striding off to find Blaise. Even if he’s with Luna, they’ll be better company than this. The thought turns over like a coin, a gleaming idea revealed on the underside—maybe if she can get Luna to like her, Luna will put in a good word to Ron about her.

✦

Outside of their circle, the world is slightly hazy, the sound is fuzzy. Five girls and one boy conduct a private, highly confidential conversation in raised voices.

“Seamus is kind of hot now,” Millie says.

Pansy snorts so hard, she belatedly smacks her hand over her mouth. 

“Do you not think so?” Luna asks.

“If we’re gonna be calling any Gryffindor hot, it’s Potter,” Theo says resolutely.

“Why are you even here. This is a girls chat.” Pansy gestures thoroughly at herself, Daphne, Millie, Luna, and Hermione.

“What about Neville?” Luna asks. “He’s quite lovely to look at.”

 Pansy thrusts her hand to the centre of the group, conducting their attention. “Ron’s obviously the hottest.”

Daphne rolls her eyes. “Obviously,” she repeats in Snape-like cadence.

“Of the Gryffindor boys,” Pansy adds belatedly, attempting to hide her obsession. She could be implying that someone else is more attractive—there were three other houses to pick from. Then, a new thought enters her mind, that maybe she’s committing some faux pas just when they’d started to be friendly—“No offence, Hermione.”

“Why would I be offended?”

Pansy’s mind works like sludge to find the answer. “You dated him and now you’re not.”

Hermione shrugs. “I think Draco’s hot. Are you offended?”

“Ohmygod Draco’s so annoying.”

“Don’t get her started, please,” Daphne begs. “She’ll never shut up.”

“No, no, no.” Pansy holds up both of her hands, pushing Daphne away with one. “Let me tell one story— let me tell one story, okay!”

She goes on to tell, in minute detail, of a dispute she and Draco had back in second year. She’s locked into conversation with Hermione for so long, the rest of the group wander off—except for Daphne, who Pansy keeps a tight grip on, to vet everything she’s saying.

“And he never apologised!”

“That’s not entirely true. He gave you purple hyacinths.”

“Ugh.”

“You like flowers!”

“I fucking hate flowers.” It was an exaggeration, but one that resonated with Pansy in the moment.

“I’ll keep it in mind, if he ever needs to apologise to you in the future,” Hermione says diplomatically.

“Guaranteed!” She holds her index finger up, pointing in Hermione’s face. “Just wait.”

“Do you have a crush on Ron, though?” Hermione asks.

Pansy freezes. “WHAT?” she asks, horrified. “What a ridiculous idea! OF COURSE I DON’T HAVE A CRUSH ON—” She suddenly registers how loud she’s speaking, perhaps how loud she’s been this whole time, perhaps how loud she’d been when she decreed Ron the hottest boy in school, on planet earth, in this solar system. Glancing around, she searches for anyone who may have overheard. Deeming it safe, she leans close to Hermione, who watches her with wide, curious eyes. “Listen closely, Granger,” she hisses. “I do not, and have not, and will not, under any circumstances have a crush on Ronald Weasley. Not now, not ever.”

Hermione nods, so slowly at first that Pansy feels strange about it. “Okay,” she says. “Sorry for bringing it up.”

Pansy straightens, chin up-tilted. “Thank you,” she says graciously.

“You know, if you ever know of someone who has a crush on Ron, like a friend or…whoever! Ron can be very oblivious to female attention. He doesn’t really know how to handle it.”

Pansy folds her arms. “I’ll be sure to keep that in mind. Not that I need to. Because I’m sure no one has a crush on Weasley—he’s a Weasley for Merlin’s sake. All his pants have holes in the knees and all he does is talk about quidditch and chess, and he’s completely average in all his classes, and he’s a gigantic sad sack, really.”

“Wait, what was that?”

Pansy spins and is confronted with fucking Ron Weasley himself. “Fuck,” she whispers.

“Which one of my brother’s a giant sack?”

Pansy is frozen. She glances at Hermione with desperation, but the witch that no one can shut up is silent, her eyes wide as she stares between the two of them.

“Percy, right?” Ron asks. “He’s the most annoying one. Unless sack means cool.”

“Of course sack doesn’t mean cool,” Pansy says witheringly, eyes narrowing and nose wrinkling.

“I don’t know what slang you Slytherin’s use,” he says with a shrug, nonchalant and unaggressive.

“We’re not like different species.” 

Ron makes a thoughtful face, then turns to Hermione. “Thoughts? Wait no, I can’t trust you. You’ve been compromised. I’ll go find Padma and ask her, she’s very smart actually she was telling me about how Muggles have these things called pages you can send messages on now, just like owls, like it’s actually called a page like a piece of paper but there’s no paper involved whatsoever—it’s bloody brilliant!”

“I’ve literally been trying to tell you things like that for years,” Hermione says crossly.

Pansy looks away, searching for her friends again. She doesn’t want to hear Ron harp on about Padma. She thinks back over the conversation, sure that Ron had caught her out for something. Had he heard her call him hot? Oh gods. She needs to leave. But she feels trapped in an ocean, water rushing around her while she stands like an island. Islands don’t have eyes, she’s stuck stranded.

Someone nudges her side. She looks up and finds Draco.

“I don’t like flowers,” she says.

He squints at her a little. “That’s not true.” Draco straightens and then says, “Millie’s over there,” as he points across the room, directing Pansy’s attention to where Millie and Nevvie sit chatting in the window seat. “You looked lost,” he supplies.

“I wasn’t,” Pansy retorts and then promptly strides away to cling to Millie’s side like a barnacle for the rest of the night.

“You can’t sit here,” she says, overriding the current conversation. Most likely boring, anyway, so it didn’t matter.

Neville looks up at her, muddy green brown eyes. “Pardon?”

“Only Slytherins can sit here. Isn’t your bum sore?”

Neville starts laughing. “A bit,” he agrees. “I did think it should be more comfortable, but I can’t seem to find my wand to cast a cushioning charm right now.” That would be because Hermione made them all put their wands in a box which she hid in her room. Something about safety blah blah alcohol blah blah dangerous. Pansy doesn’t bother pointing this out to Neville, because he’s obviously too far gone to waste time explaining.

Instead, she sharply turns her attention to Millie. “I’m putting you in charge,” she says.

“Of what?” Millie asks.

“My mouth.” 

Neville laughs.

“Don’t let me say anything else to stupid to anyone. Especially Ron.”

“Okay. Does Neville count?” 

Pansy turns her attention to the tall, dirty blond wizard. Luna had a point about him being nice to look at now. When had that happened? “...yes. Probably.”

“I can keep a secret,” Neville promises. She frowns at him, distrusting of the sparkle in his eye and the lopsided way he smiles.

Unphased, he gestures to the seat between them, which she takes gratefully. She might be reaching past the point of being fully upright.

✦

Fifteen minutes later, Pansy finds herself on her elbows, laid out on the hardwood floor. It’s not as uncomfortable as it usually would be, and concern for dirt and grime don't even register.

For lack of want to do, Neville had suggested playing a match of gobstones. He winked at her when he said it, which she greatly disliked.

“You have a pack, don’t you Pansy?” Millie said.

“I don’t know why you’d think that,” Pansy said haughtily, digging up the bag of gobstones she’d stolen weeks prior from between the seat cushions.

Neville chalked the required circles on the floor and then they were playing an intense, uncoordinated game they were supposed to have outgrown at least five years ago.

A wicked win is followed by a terrible defeat.

“That rematch was unlawful!” Pansy insists, head lolling side to side in Millie’s lap.

“I won fair and square,” Neville chuckled, legs kicked out, leaning back on his hands. Pansy squints at him, vision darkening until she can imagine his hair being more strawberry than blond.

Her eyes slip closed entirely, lulled by Millie’s fingers slowly combing through her hair. Another thing she’s meant to have grown out of. She falls asleep like that on the floor of the eighth year common room, her inebriated state allowing the feel of her friends hands on her scalp to silence the cares and worries that usually circle her mind. A cat, even when in human form.

Chapter Text

Ron’s head pounds. He stares at the runny yolk of his egg, overly-bright yellow, and feels murkily ill.

Hermione sits down across from him, bright and bushy tailed. “Morning,” she says cheerily.

Ron takes a tentative sip of his pumpkin juice. “How are you alive right now.”

“Draco gave me his hangover cure.”

Ron holds up a hand abruptly. “Please. I’ll actually be sick.”

“I meant a potion, Ron, seriously.” She shakes her head, but she’s blushing.

Ron feels mildly jealous as Hermione gathers a selection of food in front of her, taking a large bite from a slice of toast piled with beans. 

Maybe he’ll pass on the eggs. He pushes the yellow pile to the side of his plate and slices into a sausage instead.

Hermione chews and swallows and then announces; “I think Pansy has a crush on you.”

He laughs so suddenly, Parvati and Padma both turn to look at them from where they sit further down the table. “Nice one, Hermione. Did Malfoy put you up to it?”

“What?” She frowns at him. “No.”

“You seriously think that, then.”

Hermione nods enthusiastically, humming an affirmative through her toast.

“What am I meant to do with that information?” He glances down the table to the Patil twins. “You know I’m working on Padma.”

“I don’t know—” She looks at him, and then at Padma. Eventually, she says, “Just be nice to her.”

“I am nice to her.” He’d rescued her from those bullies, hadn’t he? Even though from what he’d heard about her behaviour last year at Hogwarts, he shouldn’t have bothered warning Blaise Zabini. He quite agreed with the concept of just deserts, so he wasn’t really sure why he’d said how he’d seen Peakes and his posse cornering Pansy loudly enough for Zabini to take note. It came out of his mouth before he’d figured that part out, and now, days later, he’s still not sure why. 

It felt unfair, three against one. That was all.

“You could be nicer,” Hermione says mildly, before spooning scrambled egg into her mouth with a righteous look in her eye.

“Fucking hell,” Ron groans. He shoves his plate out of the way, the smell of too many different types of breakfast foods starting to clamour at the back of his throat, and leans his head down on the table. “It’s too early for this.”

“Try this,” Seamus says, clunking a glass of something down on the table next to Ron’s elbow. He looks up just far enough to see Seamus’s infamous hangover cure—all Ron knows is that it definitely contains raw eggs and tomato juice.

“I should just go back to bed,” he says to the wooden table top. Sweetheart hadn’t been in his room anywhere, so he’d gotten out of bed in hope of catching a glimpse of her somewhere else in the eighth year common room. Something told him that having her curled up at his side while he slept off his hangover would make him heal him faster than sleep(ing) alone. He hadn’t found her in the common room, and he was already mostly dressed, so he had made his way down to the Great Hall instead.

Ron sits with his head against the table for a long moment, contemplating a nap. His bed is so far away.

Hermione clears her throat. When he doesn’t respond, she kicks him under the table.

“Oww,” he complains. “What was that for?”

She jerks her head meaningfully. His eyes follow, and land on Pansy Parkinson. She sits down next to Blaise Zabini and Millicent Bulstrode. Her hair is perfectly straight, barely brushing her shoulders, every strand in perfect order. He was sure that he’d caught glimpses of her last night where she seemed quite intoxicated, so he’s surprised to see her so put together. Maybe Draco gave her one of his hangover cures, too. 

She wrinkles her nose at something Zabini says, but a small smile cracks through in response to Bulstrode.

Ron turns his attention back to Hermione, who’s giving him an expectant look.

“My gods, leave it alone.”

“Leave what alone?” Seamus asks.

“Nothing.”

“All I’m saying is, try not to be completely obtuse about it this time.”

Ron rolls his eyes.

“Seriously. I know what it feels like to be on the receiving end of…” she gestures at his head and torso, as if he is some kind of disease that needs to be dealt with. He gives her a droll look. “You when there’s feelings involved.”

“Fine. I’ll try be nice.”

Hermione nods, good.

“Even though I highly doubt there are any feelings,” he mutters to himself. He finally selects a piece of buttered toast and shoves as much of it into his mouth at once, so he can’t be expected to further converse.

Chapter Text

Ron walks down the Hogwarts corridors, shoulders relaxed, a head above most other students, his walk casual and cool. Far too attractive to be legal, really. It only encourages all the girls to watch him even more than they already would have (including Pansy).

In her mind, he slouches in the sidelines of her memories. Something changed in the last year; he filled out as well as up, gaining confidence along the way. It would be hard not to, when the younger girls titter every time he walks past. She’s watched confident fifth years approach him, asking for a date to Hogsmeade. He let them down gently, didn’t laugh or mock them. Blushed, even, his ears first and then his cheeks.

“Pans, you’re staring,” Millie says, gently.

“She’s obsessed!” Daphne announces. Fixes her hazel eyes on Pansy’s to send the point home; “You’re obsessed.”

“Literally, shut the fuck up.” Pansy makes the short jump down from the ledge they’d been sitting on, the courtyard to their backs.

“Where are you going?” Millie asks.

“You can’t go anywhere without telling us, Blaise said—”

“Blaise isn’t my keeper, and neither are you.”

“Wait up, we’re coming!” They both wiggle off the ledge, but Pansy’s already halfway gone. It is safer to walk the hallways with friends, even if Craigleith shoots stinging jinxes at her calves every time he sees her regardless of whom she’s with. It’s better than what else he would inflict on her if she were alone.

Apparently, Pansy has other dangers to watch out for. Daphne’s hot little hand grasps hers, holding tightly.

Pansy tries to pull out of her grip, but Daphne holds on. “Get your hands off me, you lezzo.”

Daphne pouts at her but lets go. “You’ll accept affection from Weasley, but not from us.”

“I certainly won’t if you don’t leave me alone.” Pansy wipes her palm down the front of her robes.

“Ohmygod, I don’t have germs. Did I tell you though—I fingered Katie Bell in the alcove, you know the one just down from the eastern stairway? Up on the fourth floor.”

“My gods, Daphne, I don’t need that much information!”

“Since when have you been such a prude? Anyway, I made her come twice before Justin Finch-Fletchling almost found us.”

“I think his name is Finch-Fletchley,” Millie offers.

“Whatever. Katie was really worried, but I reckon he would’ve loved it.”

They’re walking into the library now. Millie and Pansy both elbow Daphne to keep her voice down. “You know what your problem is, Pans,” she says, voice barely lowered, still miles away from a whisper.

Pansy rolls her eyes and leads them through the stacks. “No, I don’t. Please enlighten me.”

“You’re turning into one of those nones. The old ladies who have ‘none ’ sex.”

“I think you mean nuns.”

“It’s how I remember it,” Daphne says with a wave of her hand. They dump their books on the table, thump, thump, thump. “You’ve practically taken a vow of chastity.”

“I have not.” She avoids eye contact with either of them, too busy flipping over to the contents page of her Herbology textbook.

“Yes you have. You’re in love with a boy who thinks you're a cat.”

“I wish I was a cat so I didn’t have to listen to you speak so much.”

“Daphne has a point…” Millie says. “You’re never going to get anywhere with him romantically.”

“I know,” Pansy growls. “Merlin. Can we stop, now?”

There’s a few moments of silence, the scratch of Pansy’s quill against parchment, her two friends whisper-arguing with each other.

Millie clears her throat. “We’re just worried, is all.”

“You don’t need to be. I’m fine.”

“We were serious, before,” Daphne says. “You let Ron touch you, like, affectionately I guess you’d call it, but he doesn’t even know that it’s you. But you won’t accept it from us.”

Pansy is tense, her shoulders creeping closer and closer to her ears. “Ron is—Ron. You don’t understand.”

“I’m gay, not an idiot,” Daphne says shortly.

“I get it,” Millie promises. “Really, I do. He makes lots of people feel safe, with the muscles and whole Potter’s-best-friend bit. But you should let us—” she breaks off, unfinished.

“Let you what ?” Pansy prompts. “Hold my hand down the hallway?”

Millie peers at her. “You didn’t even tell us that those Gryffindor quidditch kids were bothering you.”

Pansy huffs. Can Blaise not keep anything to himself? “It was fine in the end.”

“Only because Blaise found you,” Daphne points out. “We’ve made a pact, one of us is going to be with you at all times between classes.”

“I don’t recall this ‘pact’,” Pansy says icily.

“We as in me and Millie, obvs.”

“I don’t suppose I can do anything to stop you.”

“No,” Daphne says brightly and sits up straight. “There isn’t.”

Pansy makes a performance of rolling her eyes and sighing. She doesn’t let herself ruminate on the relief she feels, at not having to worry about some over-confident blockheaded Gryffindor accidentally Crucio-ing her to insanity. 

✦

“I think maybe you need to try fuck someone else,” Daphne muses. “What about Theo?”

“Ew, Merlin, no. Are you actually insane?”

“Neville?” Millie suggests. “I’ve heard he’s massive.”

“Can’t everyone tell that by looking at him?” Daphne asks. “He’s like, almost seven feet tall.”

“No, I mean he’s big.”

“Oh. Well, yeah, sure, if you’re into that kind of thing.” Daphne nods, vehemently supportive of sex involving penises, and gigantic ones at that.

✦

“What’s got your bitch face on?” Blaise asks.

Pansy doesn’t speak, doesn’t even look at him. Eventually, he gives up trying to speak to her for the rest of Herbology.

At dinner, Blaise forces himself between her and Millie, even though there isn’t any space there.

“Daphne tells me you’re mad at me for saying about Peakes.”

Pansy delicately slices into her corned beef and places an appropriately-sized bite in her mouth.

“You have to let people help you.”

She swallows before speaking. “I don’t have to do anything.” All Pansy’s life is having people tell her what to do. If it’s not her parents, apparently it has to be her friends.

“We don’t want to see you get hurt.”

Pansy glances across the table—Draco and Hermione are fastidiously ignoring their conversation, as well as Millie and even Daphne and Theo.

“Fine. I get it.”

“Okay,” he breathes. Blaise lets them eat in silence for a few minutes, the others start up a side conversation that all seems very stilted and performative.

She accidentally makes eye contact with Theo, who takes the minimal consent to interaction and runs with it like a dog with a half-live rabbit. “Can we talk about Ron, then?” he asks.

“Fuck no.” Pansy sets down her cutlery.

“Are you finished?” Daphne asks, sitting up straight. “Me too, I’ll come with you to the library.”

“You don’t have to…” Pansy sighs and gives up, not bothering to speed up her motions to try escape. 

Daphne accompanies her to the library and Pansy is very gracious about not fighting her over it in exchange for Daphne keeping any and all comments on Pansy’s life choices to herself.

Chapter Text

She’s in his room, waiting for him, but he doesn’t come. The sound levels in the common room gradually decrease as people make their way to bed.

It’s like some kind of illness, her desire to be close to him. Curled up on bed sheets that smell like him isn’t enough.

The common room is lit only by the crackling fireplace, creating darkness and shadows. Ron and Harry are the only ones still up, having dragged a low table over close to the fire to continue their chess match.

Pansy leaps up on top of the table, to remind him what he’s forgotten about.

“Oi!” Ron protests as she steps carefully around the knights and pawns.

He reaches for her, lifting her up off the board and into his lap. She circles a few times before finding the right place, and settles down. He keeps one hand on her back as they continue to play.

“Never thought I’d see the day where you liked cats,” Harry muses.

“I don’t like cats,” Ron retorts. “Just this one.” She imagines the word cats replaced with Slytherins.

There’s a stretch of silence as one of them thinks out their next move. Harry, she realises, once he directs a pawn across the board. Ron parries back immediately, taking down one of Harry’s pieces. Harry huffs.

Harry talks about how excited he is for the auror program to start next year, how much more interesting it will be than their mandated classes, how much fun it will be to be auror partners when they graduate. Ron gives short answers in response—if Pansy knew him at all, she would think he wasn’t interested in going. How long can he follow in his best friend's footsteps before he gets sick of the view?

✦

“What’s wrong with your hand?” Ron asks.

Pansy glances down at the red welt, courtesy of Peakes passing her in the hallway earlier. “It’s nothing,” she says, slipping her hand beneath the desk. She’d been trying to ignore it—she couldn’t afford to skip class to go visit Pomphrey. The witch hated her, would likely make her wait for half an hour, under the guise of being too busy to see her in a timely manner.

“Is it just so people feel sorry for you or something?”

She glowers at him and chokes out an explanation; “I’m not very good at healing spells.”

He sighs. “I’ll do it then,” he says, as if begrudgingly agreeing to do something against his will.

“No.”

But then he’s touching her, his hold firm but not painful around her wrist. His sleeves are rolled, revealing the lick of scars on his forearms. Drawing her hand back on top of the desk, he casts a cooling charm, and then a healing charm. She flexes her fingers, the skin stretching over the pale blue veins in the back of her hand with ease.

“I didn’t know you were any good at healing charms.” She’d be blushing if she wasn’t near shivering from the charm he’d cast.

“I’m not, really. Hermione used to make me practice them last year.” 

She wonders if his scars have anything to do with his adeptness for healing, only a vague, untrustworthy memory in her mind of fifth or sixth year of Ron bragging about wrestling some kind of creature—the Gryffindor trio of dolts got into all sorts of catastrophes back then without consequence, she’d hardly paid attention.

Pansy swallows. “Right.” An awkward beat. “Well, thanks.”

He snorts, as if a thank you from her is an actual joke.

Hermione slides into the seat next to him and he turns away, as if they’d never spoken to begin with. Pansy deflates slightly, like a plant once the sun has gone, thumb rubbing over the now-smooth expanse of the back of her hand.

Chapter Text

Pansy is lying against Ron’s side. He’s reading in bed, for class this time. Pansy doesn’t take Defence Against the Dark Arts, and she dislikes catching glimpses of the textbook—it makes her nervous, for reasons she’s unwilling to examine—so she faces away. Her chin is propped up over his bicep, her body tucked into the valley between his arm and torso. His thumb idly draws circles on her back and she wishes.

Gods, how she wishes she was a girl instead of a cat. That he was affectionate towards her like this while knowing it was her, was affectionate like this because it was her. She wants more than him holding her hand procedurally to cast a healing charm. More than glimpses of his naked body as he gets dressed.

To be a girl, lying next to him while he read. The want is rooted in her chest, perhaps has been for a long time now, and is flaring now under the direct heat of his touch. Like a weed that flourishes despite only catching glimpses of sunshine; his eyes lighting up at the sight of her, soft touches of affection, murmured words for just the two of them—there you are, sweetheart.

At first, his attention was enough. But no matter how much sunshine she gets, she only wants him more; a greedy, invasive ivy, climbing and twisting around him until they’re inextricably bound. The fruit it bears is poisonous, of course. 

She wants his attention to be true. To not be hiding behind a façade in order to have it.

One moment she is a cat, a breath and a deep seated desire that hurts, and the next she is a girl. Clad in only her black knickers, atop of Ron Weasley’s arm, in Ron Weasley’s bed.

Fuck.

“What the fuck? What the fuck!” Ron rolls away from her and off the bed, landing with a loud thump.

Pansy sits up, grabbing at the patchwork quilt, and tries to cover her now mostly-naked body. The pattern shifts to be decorated with clouds and rain, it’s almost comical. Her heart is pounding, blood rushing so fast she’s a little worried she’ll actually pass out from adrenalin.

“Why does this keep happening to me?” Ron demands, climbing up from the floor. He looks furious, worse than Pansy would have even imagined, if she had let herself imagine this situation. She hadn’t, because it was never meant to happen.

Pansy doesn’t know what he means. “Finding naked girls in your bed?” she asks, knowing first hand that that isn’t true. Padma hasn’t been around for weeks.

“No! Fucking, pets turning out to be animagi!”

“I know, you said about your rat—”

He straightens, fists clenched as his side, and Pansy falls silent. Perhaps now is not the time to remind him of every accidental confession he has made to her. 

“Get out.”

“But—”

“I said, get. Out.”

“I can’t leave dressed like this!” She gestures down at her body, her bare legs sticking out from beneath the quilt. Her eyes catch on her feet, exposed and fragile, and suddenly she feels so much smaller. “Everyone will think we’ve—” she can’t finish the sentence, has to forcibly swallow.

He just stands there, veins protruding along his arms from how tightly he clenches his fist. Pansy scrambles up, dragging the quilt along behind her.

“You can’t put that on,” he protests when she reaches for his discarded quidditch jersey.

“I’m in my fucking knickers!”

“It’s my quidditch jersey,” he exhorts, as if that explains anything.

“Fine,” she retorts, tossing it back down to pick up a rumpled school shirt instead. She turns to the side to slip it over her shoulders and let the quilt fall away, her fingers fumbling as she tries to do up the buttons.

Ron sighs loudly from behind her. “I said to leave. What part of you didn’t understand that?”

“If you’d just let me put your quidditch jersey on, I would be gone by now!” She turns to face him, only half the buttons done.

“Bloody hell.” For a moment, she thinks he’s going to reach forward and do the buttons for her. Instead, he directs his wand at her. She flinches when he casts the spell, he sneers at her reaction. The remaining buttons slot themselves into place—they’re all off by one, hitched higher on the left than they should be.

“I guess I’ll—”

“Yes.” He takes a large step sideways, gesturing to the door. The shirt reaches half way down her thighs, all the essential bits covered. She’s not sure why then, his eyes are fixed on the floor. 

“Ron, I’m—”

He glances up at her briefly before he pushes his hands through his hair, eyes pinched shut. “I can’t look at you,” he grinds out.

Pansy bites her cheek hard, her eyes burning. She doesn’t say anything—she wouldn’t be able to find the words and form the shape of them even if she tried. Head down, she slips out of his room, not wanting to know whether anyone is around to catch her. She makes it two paces before Ron’s bedroom door is slammed shut behind her. 

The days of a gap being left open for her are gone.

Chapter Text

Ron slams the door shut as soon as Pansy has stepped out into the hall.

He sits down heavily on his bed, head in his hands.

What the actual fuck. 

That whole time—every time—Sweetheart sneaking into his room, under his bed, in his bed. Every time he spoke to her softly, whispered his secrets, thinking he was healing or something, that this animal that had shown up out of nowhere was helping him.

All along, his confidant was fucking PANSY. PARKINSON.

He grabs a pillow, presses it to his face, and screams.

Chapter Text

“Pans?”

Pansy burrows deeper beneath the covers. Crookshanks, sitting on her pillow where her head is meant to go, grumbles at the commotion.

Unfortunately, being girl shaped makes it easier to be found. She can’t stop crying long enough to focus on shifting—although apparently now it can happen by accident, in literally the worst possible situation. Next she’ll be accidentally shifting in front of fucking Headmistress McGonagall, or soon-to-be Auror, Boy Wonder, Harry Potter.

“Pansy, what’s wrong?”

“Go away.” Her voice comes out clogged and rough.

Millie’s hand lands on her knee and squeezes. “What’s happened?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she says, voice muffled by the way her face is pressed into the mattress.

“Do you want me to get Blaise? Or Draco?”

The idea alone doubles her upset. The fact that her friends still think that fucking Draco Malfoy is the solution when she’s crying, when Draco is busy being too in love with Hermione Granger to have any idea what’s going on with her. He never even asked her if she was okay after Craigleith almost Crucio’d her.

Pansy rips down the covers, so she can shout at Millie face-to-face. “I said go away. I don’t want you, I don’t want Draco, I don’t want to talk about it at all, okay? I don’t want you to touch me, I don’t want you to talk to me, I want you to LEAVE.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“Yes I do. I know you don’t want to be there for me, just trying to palm me off. No one even wants you around, Millie. Why are you bothering?”

At that, Millie’s jaw clicks shut, her eyes dim. “Right.” She stands. 

“Close the curtains,” Pansy snaps.

“I’m not your mother.”

Pansy laughs darkly—no, Millie certainly isn’t Sylvanna Parkinson. But her mother never would have shut the curtains for her, either. Certainly wouldn’t have comforted her for crying. She gives up on the curtains, dragging the duvet back over her head so it’s dark again, and all she’s left with is the look of horror when Ron realised all along, it had been her, the sickly feeling of knowing that Millie hurts now too, and the horrid memory of crying to a mother who didn’t have the patience to deal with it.

When she was nine years old, they’d had to put down her pony, Sunbeam. She had been riding him far out in the paddocks, pushing him hard because she was pissed off about something that didn’t matter at all, when his hoof got caught in the opening of a goblin warren. He’d fallen, leg twisting, and Pansy was flung off sideways. His leg, her arm; broken. She didn’t understand why her arm could be fixed, while Sunbeam's broken leg was a death sentence.

She hadn’t cried from the pain in her arm, hadn’t shed a tear when the Healer reset the bone. But she had bawled when her father ended Sunbeam’s life in front of her.

Her mother had cringed as she patted her shoulder, unfamiliar to handing out affection.

Really Pansy, it’s not a big deal. You’ll get over it.

       It was just a horse. 

             You’ll get over it.

It’s not a big deal.

             Won’t you stop crying now?

       get         over         it.

Pansy’s not over it. She wasn’t then, she isn’t now. Her friendship with Ron is the same; prematurely dead, by her own hands. She won’t get over it, can’t get over it, will never get over it.

✦

Pansy may have stopped crying, but she’s still reeling. It hasn’t fully sunk in, that Ron knows.

She works her way through a pain au chocolat, and then selects a ginger crunch slice. She doesn’t even like the flavour that much, she just needs something to chew on.

“Careful,” Draco murmurs. “Pansy’s stress eating. Don’t ask her what’s wrong. Certainly don’t look at her the wrong way.”

“What’s the wrong way?” Hermione asks, sounding genuinely curious.

“That would be,” his breath hitches in dramatic thought, “any way at all.”

“Piss off.” Pansy shoots a (mild) stinging jinx at his face with her wand. He ducks, but it still clips his ear, resulting in a satisfying yelp. But then Hermione starts cooing at him, getting him to tilt his head so she can check the wound. Pansy rolls her eyes and looks away, lest she be forced to commit further acts of violence.

“What’re you all pissed off about now?” Blaise asks. “Even Millie told me not to bother.”

Pansy picks up another piece of ginger crunch slice—the elves had cut them too small, anyway.

“Did you get a bad mark back in Transfiguration? I’m sure McGonagall will let you do some extra credit if you just ask—”

“Oh, she definitely would,” Hermione charms in. 

Pansy glares at her. She must know. Why was she playing dumb, acting like she didn’t?

Hermione blinks at her. “What?” 

How long until everyone knows? Ron has no obligation to keep her secret, no loyalty. If she was him, she would dob him in immediately. Get him removed from school. What kind of creep lead someone to believe they were an animal, lulling them into a sense of safety that allowed all their walls to be lowered, until they were maskless and the only version of themselves that remained was the one no one ever saw, when all along—

She sets down the remaining half of the slice. Her mouth suddenly feels fuzzy, coated in too much sugar. She might be sick.

“Don’t play stupid,” Pansy says meanly. “You don’t get points for playing down what a fucking brain you are.”

“Hey.”

Pansy whips her glare to Draco, gesturing at Hermione as she exclaims, “She already knows!”

No one has anything to say to that, all sat staring at her.

“You all fucking know. And now, he does too.”

So much for keeping it to herself.

Daphne: “Ohhhh.”

“I swear, I didn’t tell anyone,” Hermione promises, eyebrows pinched in concern.

“Don’t worry,” Pansy simpers, grimacing with fake sympathy. “I’m enough of an idiot to fuck it up myself.”

“Maybe it’s a good thing,” she says hopefully. “You couldn’t continue like that forever.”

Pansy stands, not wanting to hear any of Hermione’s soothing platitudes. She glares at Blaise before he can say anything about her leaving and catches him sharing a look with Daphne.

“I’ll come with you,” Daphne calls after her.

Pansy pauses to glance back. “Don’t—” She sighs. There’s not much point in arguing, they’ve made it clear they don’t care about her wishes. She continues walking away, not caring for how Daphne keeps up.

Daphne keeps her distance, anyway. Millie’s probably complained about what a bitch Pansy was yesterday.

Despite the ruined state her life is in, she still needs to study. She doesn’t even need to glare at Daphne to stop her from sitting next to her in the library—she takes a table further down along the wall.

Pansy wishes she was alone so she could set her head against the table and groan. Or maybe cry.

No. Enough crying. She isn’t a fucking baby.

She flips open her Muggle Studies textbook, the most confusing and thus brain-consuming of all of her course work. Maybe if she tries hard enough, she’ll forget not only her problems, but also her own mortifying existence.

✦

The only light source is the moon through the windows in the common room, stretching its thin arms down the corridor. Her girl-eyes can’t see as well in the dark; even if she holds them wide open, it’s still all just shadows. 

But Pansy has made this trek enough times to not need her vision. Her hand grips the door handle, and twists. Immediately, she is met with resistance. 

Illogically, idiotically, she tries again. Rattles the door in its frame, overwhelmed with her desperation. She just needs to get inside. One more moment curled up in the wardrobe, asleep on a forgotten Molly Weasley jumper. One more moment beneath the bed next to the sweet wrappers and broken extendable ears and dust bunnies. He doesn’t even have to let her on the bed, if only he’d let her inside—

The door won’t open. He’s locked her out. 

Pansy forces herself to take a breath. She needs to think more like a witch. Taking out her wand, she tries casting to identify the wards he’s put in place. They glimmer, the soft orange haze of safety and protection. Seeing them just makes her want to bang on the door harder, to scream and yell and demand that he let her back in.

Instead, she turns away, Plan B rapidly coalescing in her mind.

Digging her broom out of her trunk, she’s thankful for the past, naïve version of herself that had packed it, imagining flying for her mental health or some shit. Cool night air rushes in when she opens the window, and she realises it’s raining. The castle is so large, with so many enchantments, the sound had been muted down to nothing.

She mounts her broom and flies out into the bad weather regardless. Counting the windows around the turret, she finds his easily; there’s writing on the window forged by Seamus Finnegan— danger to spiders, ye not enter here. He’d told her a story once, how Fred would line spiders up on window sills as a warning to other spiders to not enter. Ron couldn’t mimic him though, even seeing the curled up dead bodies made him shiver.

The curtains are drawn, preventing her from cupping her hands on the glass and peering through to see whether he’s sleeping or was awakened by her yanking on his door.

The insanity of the moment hits her. What was she going to do, break a window? Most likely, he is awake right now. She hadn’t been subtle in her attempted break in.

She’s lost it. Completely.

Pansy straightens, her broom sinking back from the window. She reaches one hand off the broom handle to wipe her face and push wet strands of hair behind her ears.

It’s the middle of the night. No one has seen her. Did an embarrassing breakdown count, if no one was around to witness it?

She flies back to her own dorm window, and then inside. The curtains around both Daphne and Millie’s beds are still drawn. She takes care to return the broom to where she got it, hiding the evidence, before stripping off her soaking wet clothes and climbing into bed. A damp halo forms on the pillow around her head but she doesn’t care enough; she’s already moved on. She’s not going to lose her fucking mind over Ron Weasley.

Thank Salazar he has no idea.

Chapter Text

Ron sits on his bed replaying memories and feeling like everything has been tainted, as he works through eating a bag of salt and vinegar crisps. The flavouring is starting to sting, seasoning working into wounds that previously didn’t exist at the corner of his lips and roof of his mouth.

He’d never liked cats much, and they didn’t like him either. He was fine with that. But then Sweetheart had slayed a spider for him, had sat with him while he cried. Listened to him speak about Fred when he couldn’t speak to anyone else about it.

It was some kind of cosmic joke, that all along it was Pansy Parkinson.

Hermione had planted the seed, infected his thoughts. Instead of focusing on Padma when she spoke to him, his eyes kept tracking to Pansy. To see where she was, to catch her out. Surely if she had a crush on him, she would be watching him. 

It only happened a few times, enough to seem innocuous. Not enough to prove anything—anyone would make accidental eye contact if you waited long enough. Their eyes met, and instead of looking away, Ron maintained the connection. Her eyes narrowed a fraction, her thoughts loud and clear; what are you looking at, weirdo. 

The most confirmation he’d gotten was from the way her cheeks flushed when he took her wrist, forcing her to let him see the welt on the back of her hand. He’d thought her so coldhearted she was more similar to a marble statue than a warmblooded human. Didn’t think she was capable of blushing. It was the only clue that Hermione was at least on to something—casting a healing charm didn’t seem like a blush-worthy situation to Ron, unless feelings were involved.

Yesterday, he hadn’t left his room for finding out the truth, fully spiralling for the rest of the night.

Of course, Harry and Hermione knew something was wrong as soon as they laid eyes on him in the morning. He had refused to say anything. 

It was after dinner that Hermione grabbed him. “Ron. I know what happened.”

He met her eyes, a silent challenge.

“I know about Pansy.”

At that, his resolve to keep the newest item added to the list of MOST EMBARRASSING THINGS TO EVER HAPPEN TO ME to himself, crumbled. It had been a list he had hoped to stop adding to with age, and then Pansy Parkinson shoved herself right to the top—and there were some heinously cringe worthy moments on that list. Things that haunted him in the middle of the night as sleep evaded him, until he felt  like a curled up blast-ended skrewt for how much it made him wish himself out of existence.

Somewhere along the way, Malfoy dropped into the conversation. Ron didn’t have the energy expenditure required to focus on telling him to fuck off.

He ended his emotional tirade with; “This is worse than fucking Peter Pettigrew.”

“Is iiit?” Hermione questioned, her tone lilting and doubtful as she stretched out the second syllable.

“Yes!” 

“Peter was a thirty year old man working for the ‘Dark Lord’. Pansy’s just a nineteen year old girl—”

“They're not really comparable,” agreed Malfoy.

“Pansy was a wannabe Death Eater!” Ron insisted.

“I assure you, she definitely did not want to be,” Malfoy said with gravitas that made Ron squirm—he avoided eye contact and waited for the moment to end. “And besides, which would you rather have in your bed?”

“She still lied to me. It wouldn’t be okay if I did that, would it? It wouldn’t be suddenly not creepy?”

“No, it’s still weird,” Hermione agreed. “We’re just saying, a thirty year old man is definitely worse.”

Ron remains unconvinced. Yes, in some ways a girl his age was better. In others, it was much, much worse.

In bed half naked as he is now, he struggles to recall every time he could have gotten changed in front of Pansy and not realised. He hadn’t thought twice about doing it, so they weren’t marked in his memory. 

Had she looked or not looked? Had she liked what she’d seen or had she—fuck. 

At least he’d never fucking wanked with her in the room, it had felt sacrilegious to do with another being around, even if he had only thought she was a CAT and not a GIRL HIS AGE.

Even though he doesn’t really want them anymore, he finishes the bag of crisps. A half-assed job of vanishing the crumbs and then he tucks himself in, too lazy to go down to the bathrooms to clean his teeth and prepare for bed properly (he’s definitely not scared off his broom about running into her by accident). Worn out from experiencing too many emotions any person should have to with 24 hours, he falls quite swiftly into a fitful sleep.

✦

Ron wakes in the middle of the night, filled with the sense that he’s forgotten something urgent. He can’t tell what’s woken him, all he knows is that something has. His ears prick in the silence, but he can’t hear anything save for the faint patter of rain against his window.

He gets up, driven by feeling and belief more than logic and lucidity. The door is shut, that’s the problem. Sweetheart was probably trying to get in, that’s what woke him. He pulls open the door, gaze falling down to the floor, fully expecting to see the gleam of Sweetheart’s dark brown eyes blinking up at him. Anticipates the brush of her fur against his calf as she darts into the room, too quick for him to see.

But no. Nothing is there, no one is there. He takes in a deep breath, reality forming more solidly in his sleep-duped brain. Sweetheart is gone. She’s not ever coming back.

Did she ever really exist in the first place?

Chapter Text

“Where’d you get that from? Blaise?” Daphne pinches the would-be crisp sleeve of Pansy’s shirt. “It looks good on you.”

The embers of Pansy’s cold dead heart flare hotly. She’s wearing the shirt she pilfered from Ron’s floor, in an attempt to not make it look like they’d been fucking when he kicked her out. It’s a ‘would-be crisp’ because everything Ron owns seems to have already existed for a hundred years, worn in well enough that the fabric would never be stiff, no matter how many cleaning charms were cast on it.

Pansy likes it though, how thin and soft the fabric is, how oversized it is on her frame. It barely meets the parameters for school uniform—the collar loose at her neck and the hem untucked so it lays over top of her skirt, sticking out from beneath her vest—but hardly anyone in eighth year actually follows those guidelines apart from Hermione Granger, swot extraordinaire. Fabric alterations are Pansy’s strength, and yet she would never dream to alter it to fit her better than it fits Ron.

“Ooh, is it Draco’s? Granger will be hilarious when she finds out. How do you think we can hint at it in front of her, for maximum emotional impact? You know she’ll be even more furious if she thinks she’s figured out a secret.”

“If you want to create relationship drama so badly,” Pansy begins, icy enough that Daphne stills like a prey animal, “why don’t you just switch back to fucking guys?”

“Okay, there we go.” Daphne nods. “How long did it take you to come up with that, a few days? Or did it just come to you now?”

“Sorry to disappoint, but I actually don’t spend my free time thinking about you.” 

Daphne rolls her eyes. “We all know you have a list of insults in the back of your diary, you can’t fool me.” Daphne squints at her. “I know you too well. I also know that you feel bad for what you said about Millie, and you’ll feel bad about what you said about me.” She stands, smoothing down her skirt. “Ron’s shirt looks nice on you. Too bad he won’t even make eye contact with you now.”

Pansy’s muscles tense, preparing to spit out an acidic comeback, but Daphne is already walking away to sit at a desk further down the aisle. She’d have to shout her insults at this distance, and it’s really not worth the wrath of Madam Pince. She looks back to her coursework, the text swimmy and unfocused, and tries to stop herself from wondering when exactly saying nasty things to people stopped making her feel better.

✦

She just wants to be close to him, to hear the sound of his voice and be able to make out all the words. To know what he’s thinking.

Skulking through the shadows, Pansy follows him invisibly. It’s easy, when in the form of a black cat, the darkness donned like a cloak. She can blend right in, until even she can’t tell the difference.

He’s with Seamus, Harry, and Neville. Doing his best to smile but it looks brittle, even from the distance Pansy is stuck at. Neville’s saying something about Herbology, Pansy edges closer, dreading whether he will bring up her.

“The cell level of plants is really interesting, Sprout was telling me that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. It—”

Ron whips around, so fast that Pansy stumbles in her tracks. “Fuck off, Pansy!”

A cat is a girl, irreversibly. Sweetheart is gone, she can’t go back. It’s fuck off and it’s Pansy. The shape of her name is disenchantment and exasperation coming from his mouth. 

She’d always hoped for it to be soft and reverent, she knew he was capable of it.

But not for her.

“Just leave me alone,” he says, vexed and tired. She stares up at him from the shadows. How had he even known she was there?

Seamus: “Ron, it’s just a cat.”

Neville: “Isn’t that your cat?”

Harry: “Your cat is bloody Pansy Parkinson??” 

Wow, perhaps Harry Potter really did have the makings to become an Auror. 

“She’s not mine!” Ron insists. “Let’s go.”

Neville is peering at her, trying to decode the cat to girl equation. She never let anyone else truly see her but Ron—to all other students, she was a blur passed in the hallway without a second glance. A familiar enough shape that no one thought twice. 

Seamus tugs on Neville’s arm, prompting him to follow Ron and Harry. 

Unable to follow, lest he yell at her again, Pansy heads for the forest.

She pads over dirt and grass, amongst the daisies and dandelions. Deeper, the sunlight struggles to reach past the dense trees, but still, things grow. Wildflowers, ferns, moss—and weeds, always, always weeds.

The scuttle of small creatures prick at her ears. This is where she should have stayed all along. This is where animals are meant to be, after all. 

Outside. 

Alone.

Chapter Text

Pansy quickly deduces that the groups being called off by McGonagall are in alphabetical order and her insides promptly begin twisting anxiously. A week ago, she would have been thrilled to have an excuse to talk to Ron, an opportunity to try convince him she wasn’t completely abhorrent. Now, she’d rather jump into the Black Lake to avoid it.

“And that leaves, Parkinson, Parvati, and Weasley.” The Headmistress sets down her list and looks up with her ever-present stern expression. “You have fifteen minutes to discuss.”

Everyone gets up to shift desks. Pansy hangs back to see where Ron and Padma end up and then joins them at Ron’s desk group. He doesn’t look up when she pulls up a chair and sits down.

“This is such a very interesting project,” Padma says, eyes scanning over the parchment even though she definitely read it all the way through before McGonagall had even finished handing them out.

Ron grunts in response.

Their task is to transfigure an item to appear as another, while its molecular make up remains the same. Pansy thought it sounded a lot like an arts and crafts project. 

“We could do wearable arts,” she suggests. 

“Let's do food,” Ron says, as if she’d never spoken. “Transfigure some sort of food to look like something else—a banana to look like a phone.”

Padma hums thoughtfully. “Like a movie prop in reverse. I like your idea too, Pansy.”

Pansy winces at her. She doesn’t like being on the receiving end of empathy-induced generosity. She tries her idea again; “I’ve seen in magazines, people make wearable art out of all sorts of things.”

“I think a cake would be good,” Ron says. “Charm it to look like Harry’s face and freak everyone out by slicing into it.”

“You can’t just ignore me forever, Weasley,” Pansy says moodily, crossed arms and everything. “It’s a group project.”

Ron snorts. Padma reads the assignment over again closely, acting as if she’s so enraptured, she couldn’t possibly be paying any attention to them. Pansy knows it’s bullshit, but she’s beyond caring—nearly.

“We have to all agree.”

“I don’t think that’s possible,” Ron says dryly. “Padma’s the deal breaker, that’s why it’s groups of three.”

“That’s not fair at all—you’ve been trying to fuck her for months now.”

Padma stiffens.

Meanwhile, Ron finally looks at her, anger bursting out of him as he exclaims; “Oh, and you would know, wouldn’t you?”

Pansy holds her shoulders tightly, jutting her chin out. “Yes. She’s not impartial if you’ve had her in your bed.”

Ron stares at her. Pansy realises what she’s said.

He stands, chair scraping back on the tiles. “Fine. I’ll just ask McGonagall which idea she thinks is better.”

“No—don’t—” Her hand twitches on the table top, as if she would actually dare to reach out and stop him physically. Rather than watching him go, she looks away and tries to appear as small as possible. She doesn’t want to be on McGonagall’s radar.

Ron returns a short thirty seconds later, yanking his chair out and sitting down with a huff. “She said we have to decide ourselves.”

“Shocking,” Padma murmurs.

“We can do your fucking cake thing. I really don’t care.”

“Great!” Padma says. “We might get additional points if it’s edible and I’ve already got lots of ideas.” 

Pansy rolls her eyes. Why hadn’t Padma just said so in the first place? 

“Shall we start a brainstorm?” Padma rolls out a sheet of parchment onto the desk between them before they can respond, while Pansy angrily imagines how much cooler wearable art would be than a fucking cake of the Chosen One’s face.

✦

He’s never in the library. Why is he in the library? It must mean something. She can’t just walk past him and not say anything, not when he’s alone and—

“Why won’t you even give me a chance?”

Pathetic. She is pathetic.

Ron looks up, and there’s a moment of question before he realises who’s speaking to him. Evidently, he hasn’t memorised her voice and she’s disappointed all over again. 

“Why should I?”

“I know you, Ron,” she says desperately.

He sets his wand down, almost as if he’s willing to hear her out. Or maybe he just felt at risk of impulsively cursing her if he kept it in hand.

“I know you don’t really want to be an auror. I know you read history books when no one’s watching. I know you’re kind to animals, but you hate spiders.”

“I know,” he grits out. “I told you things I’ve never said, to anyone. I regret it more than you can possibly imagine.”

“I’m sorry,” she says weakly.

Ron shakes his head adamantly. “No, you’re not. You’re just sorry you got caught.”

Pansy swallows. She can’t bring herself to regret it. The only thing she regrets is that he found out. Is lack of regret the same as lack of sorriness?

“I don’t regret it,” she whispers hollowly. “But I am sorry. You don’t get to dictate how I feel.”

Ron barks out a bitter laugh.

”I told you,” he says, shaking his head. 

She opens her mouth, confused—that was her point, that she knew him better than anyone else.

“I told you about Pettigrew, and you STILL—fucking—” He shakes his head, too disturbed or disgusted or infuriated to continue. She watches as he shoves his hand through his hair, gripping tightly at the strands, and the pit of awfulness inside of her falls open another couple hundred feet.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers and she means it this time. She didn’t mean to hurt him.

She wishes she could tell him how much it had all meant to her, but it would be like lighting herself on fire, setting her own head on a pike. Self preservation holds her back. Ron wouldn’t have the sympathy and patience required to listen and understand, he’d just scoff if she said she was lonely (is lonely).

She opens her mouth to say something, probably embarrassing and too honest, but Ron either doesn’t notice or doesn’t want to give her time to speak first— “That’s the problem, Parkinson. You know everything about me. I don’t know you at all.”

That was how she preferred it. “You wouldn’t like me if you did.”

He sighs, exasperated. “I don’t currently like you.” 

Pansy’s shoulders fall, the verbalisation of the truth she has been in denial over feels like he’s hexed her heart black and burnt.

His eyes catch on something behind her, Pansy turns to find a house elf making her way down the aisle. It’s Drizzle, carrying a cream envelope. Pansy can see the red ink from here. Fuck. Fuck.

“Fuck.”

The elf looks up at her with orb-like grey eyes. “Drizzle has a letter for Miss Pansy Parkinson from Headmistress McGonagall.”

Pansy, wide-eyed, turns her head to look at Ron. “What the fuck did you do.”

“I didn’t do anything!”

She takes the letter from Drizzle’s small hand. “Thank you,” she mutters, knowing Ron probably holds some kind of standard of being ‘nice’ to elves because of his friendship with the Chief Witch of Spewing.

Now that the letter has been delivered, Drizzle disapparates. Pansy stares down at the large, swirling P at the beginning of her name and debates opening it. She already knows what it contains.

Ron sighs, mutters something under his breath that she doesn’t catch.

She squints at him to see he’s pulling on his hair again, grimacing. “What?”

He drops his hand and looks at her. How had she forgotten how blue his eyes are? “I didn’t tell anyone. I didn’t tell McGonagall.”

“No, but you did yell at me while I was in my cat form. So, as good as.”

“You shouldn’t have been following me around!” he shoots back. Apparently his contrition is a short fuse, quickly burnt through to his anger.

The words take shape in the back of her mouth, heavy on her tongue, a plea of I missed you. She keeps her lips sealed.

“Looks like we both did things we regret,” she says shortly. They make eye contact, briefly, and she hopes he’s pissed off at her meaning. “See you in Charms, if I’m not expelled by then.” She strides off to find somewhere to read the letter alone and mourn the impending premature loss of the only home she’s ever truly had.

Chapter Text

Gossip twines through Hogwarts like a stream, persistent and reckoning. Impossible to stop; reasonably entertaining to watch. Even if it’s just a whisper, once it’s in the current, salacious information pumps quickly through the heart of the school and then out to the limbs, and everyone knows everyone’s business, regardless of its validity. 

“She’s super freaky. I heard she watched him get changed like all the time.”

It makes Pansy furious. It wasn’t all the time. Just sometimes, when the timing worked out. It wasn’t like she sought it out on purpose.

“You get sent to Azkaban for that. You have to be registered if you’re an animagus, and who knows how long she’s been one for?”

“Exactly where she should have been this whole time, as well as Malfoy. What are the chances he’s one, too?”

Pansy walks past the group of girls with her head down, careful to not draw attention to herself by walking too quickly. More than ever, she wishes she could attend class as a cat—even though the secret is out now, at least it’s easier to move about stealthily, slip under the radar. Girl-sized, she draws people's eyes and whispers in every hallway she walks down, no matter how small she tries to be.

✦

Vibrating so hard with stress, she’s almost frozen as she sits down across from McGonagall. Scattered sensations; the chair feels unreal beneath her, while the pressure of her feet flat against the blood red and gold rug is more intense than it should be. Her breath is over-loud as her lungs fill and empty, like the rushing of wind through an empty tunnel. 

Sound is coming out of the Headmistress’s mouth but Pansy’s ears fail to capture the majority of it. Something impressive and perseverance. Pansy’s bones are on edge, all sharp edges and dull pale-white death, as she waits for prison and sentence and a permeating ringing fills the room.

“I was hoping to not have to do this until the end of the year, but the Hogwarts Rumour Mill has caught wind of your moonlighting as a black cat.” McGonagall clucks her tongue disdainfully. “Here are the forms.” Paperwork is slid across the desk.

Pansy blinks down at it, the ringing slowly abating. “What?”

A gigantic DMLE logo, and then, Form 27A: Animagus Registry. Name, date of birth, gender, ethnicity…

“I understand that you may feel reservations against registering your status, but it truly is the only option if you want to be able to live your life freely. The information is stored confidentially by the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, so you would not need to disclose your status to anyone in your personal life if you did not wish to do so.”

All at once, the tension leaves Pansy’s body. She hadn’t even realised how tightly she’d been holding herself until she stopped.

“You’re not sending me to Azkaban,” she says, clutching the form in both of her hands.

Headmistress McGonagall snorts delicately. “Of course not. I’ve kept you away from there this long, did you think I was about to give up now?”

Pansy stares at McGonagall. She hadn’t known or thought that the formidable Gryffindor witch would ever care about her, let alone put in effort to keep her out of Azkaban, and now realises all at once how stupid and naïve that had been—Hogwarts was McGonagall’s now, after all. Of course she had been the one with the power to make the decision to let her stay—or perhaps even demand that she stay.

…to protect her?

Pansy licks her lips. “Oh. Thank you.”

“Do you need help with the form?” McGonagall asks. “You’ll see there’s a section to write down any unique markings.”

“It’s okay, I know what I look like.”

McGonagall threads her fingers together atop of her desk. The backs of her fingers and hands are wrinkled and sunspotted and Pansy can’t help the flitting thought that if it was her, she would charm such creases and evidence of age away.

“The forms do require a photo which has been verified by a member of the Wizengamot.”

Fuck. How is she going to get that?

McGonagall inclines her head. “You remember of course that I am a member of the Wizengamot.”

Pansy’s never liked shifting in front of people, it’s always felt private. It’s worse now, because the last time it happened in front of someone was outside of her control. “I’m not ready to—in front of someone.”

McGonagall nods. “I’ll give you a week to hand the forms back. Can’t let things go too long, in case any students send word home to their parents about the new animagus in school.” There’s the faint outline of a wry smile on her face. Pansy blinks and it’s gone.

“So much for it being confidential,” she mutters.

“I will be strongly advising students not to,” McGonagall says sternly, and Pansy feels immediately chastened. “But we must also take precautions.”

It seemed the bed had been made, or whatever it was Muggles said. (She’s been struggling to keep the colloquialisms organised in her mind, even after hours of study.)

“By next month, most people will have forgotten.” Now McGonagall’s expression is borderline sympathetic . How can Pansy stop it? “Students' parents' minds will not cling to your name.”

She’s doubtful—it sounds too optimistic to be realistic. Wishful thinking never got Pansy anywhere good, or real.

“It’s fine. The tea’s been spilled.”

McGonagall looks at her. Fuck, was it meant to be milk?

“You’re free to go.”

“Thank you.” Pansy stands, her years of etiquette training the only thing preventing her from straight up hightailing it out of the room.

Chapter Text

“Where the fuck are they,” Ron mutters to himself. He shoves a box of chocolate frog cards out of the way. Pauses to consider where to put the dumbbells he outgrew five months ago.

He’d hidden chocolate back here in the first place because it always seemed to go missing. He used to think it was Hermione or Harry but they always denied it, Hermione giving him a look like he was just fooling himself, as if he’d somehow eaten it already and forgotten. His second theory had been house elves, but he couldn’t say that to her without starting an argument. Now though, he wonders if it could have been Sweetheart—Pansy. No, Parkinson . He shouldn’t let himself refer to her as Pansy, even just in his head. It was too…something.

He tosses aside a scarf that he never wears, fallen from where it’s meant to hang, and then a drawing of a manticore he can’t remember why he kept. It might have been from Seamus or Dean? Both, probably.

There, he spots it. A blue knitted jumper, protecting his emergency stash of chocolate. His fingers hook into it, only intending to pull it aside long enough to grab the bar of caramel he’s thinking of and not dwell on previous jumper ownership, but the texture registers wrong. He draws it closer and sees why—cat hair. A whole layer of it, black and matted into shape as if a small animal has sat on it regularly, over days, weeks.

Pansy. Was there any part of his life she hadn’t gotten herself all over, while he was none the wiser? How long had she been hiding back here before he caught her that first time?

He shakes the jumper out, drawing out his wand to cast a cleaning charm and banish the cat hair.

The yellow F doesn’t flicker or glimmer like Ron feels it should, doesn’t wink at him like a shared secret. 

Fred had always winked at him. 

Mid-conversation with Mum, behind the back of any of their shared older brothers, while poking fun at Ginny—dark blue eyes meeting light, humour or commiseration depending on the context, paired with a conspiratorial wink. They were in on something together. Fred was on his side, even if his words sometimes said otherwise.

Ron wishes he could tell Pansy that story. She had been good at listening. Of course, she’d had no other choice, seeing as it appeared a cat’s body wasn’t capable of speech, if her meowing was anything to go by—she wouldn’t have faked meowing , right?

The point being—it wasn’t like she was held captive. No, she’d sought him out on purpose. Came back even when he told her under no uncertain terms not to. Sat with him when he was alone and crying and never made him feel anything but accepted. Which had been a stupid way to feel about a cat, but she hadn’t been a cat. She’d been a girl in disguise the whole time.

Ron’s not sure why but he takes the jumper with him, along with the deformed bar of caramel chocolate. Climbs into bed with it, tucking it at his side in a ball. He doesn’t let himself consider how weird he’s being. He’s not sure who he’s trying to feel closer to, Fred or Pansy. 

Probably just Fred—he’s mourning him still. Pansy’s unrelated…except for all the memories of his grief she’s become entwined with.

If he falls asleep next to his dead brother’s balled up Christmas jumper while wishing it moved with the breath and heartbeat of a cat—no, he didn’t.

Chapter Text

Every time she sets down her cutlery at the dining table, her quill in the library, or class is dismissed, Daphne or Millie or Blaise—or worst of all, Draco—scramble to follow after her before she can leave alone.

It’s a slow, drawn out death, the way they’re quietly, persistently suffocating her.

She imagines what Ron would have to say about her being the eldest daughter, whether it was her upbringing or her DNA that forged her stubborn independence.

Now, the air is crisp and clear as she draws it into her lungs. The absence of the hundreds of eyeballs—not only her friends, but everyone’s—is like a weight lifted from her back. No one knows where she is, not even Blaise.

The shore along the Black Lake is mud. She would never admit it, but she likes the texture of it beneath her paws, finds entertainment value in seeing paw prints pressed into the black-brown earth and knowing she created them.

The peace is broken when she feels a prick at her neck. She looks to the painted sky, a blue so pale it’s as if the pigment used was finite, dotted with three bold specks of red and gold, rapidly gaining in size. 

She is the centre of a bullseye as the three boys on broomsticks hone in on her, blocking off every exit that isn’t the water. Pansy can’t imagine the Giant Squid would take kindly to a cat in its home.

The hair down her arched back is raised and spiked. Peakes, Cookes, and Craigleith are already chortling to one another over what they likely consider peak humour. Pansy doubts it would even be worth scratching onto a bathroom wall.

“That you, Parkinson?” Peakes calls out, touching down to land and swinging off his broom. The other two follow.

“It’s definitely her,” Cookes says.

To the left, Craigleith points his wand at her. “Shift back,” he demands. “Shift back, or I’ll kill you.” He angles his head, a slight up tilt to his thin lips. “If you’re just a cat, no one will care.”

She doesn’t have a choice, does she?  She’s thankful, then, that she skipped going back to the dorm to discard excess clothing layers in favour of successfully evading her friends. Gaining five feet in three seconds, she shifts and stands before the three bullies in her school uniform. She holds herself still, like the ice queen everyone thinks she is, as if making no sudden movements will increase her chances of escaping unscathed.

Her gaze tracks slowly over each of them. “Boys.”

“No playing around this time,” Cootes says, elbowing Craigleith. “Come on.”

Mentally, she battles between standing her ground and running away. Self preservation—her dignity or her bodily safety.

The choice is taken from her when she finds herself turning hide and sprinting, instincts overtaking. When faced with a bigger, badder adversary, a cat runs.

Peakes snatches her arm, wrenching it near out its socket, and throws her to the ground. Sprawled on the mire, someone casts a binding hex on her legs. She struggles on the muddy ground like a fish rapidly suffocating.

“Oi!”

She looks to the sky again and sees a singular spot of red and gold. Even at a distance, he’s clearly larger, stronger than the others. His hair is like a flaming beacon, but she would recognise the shape of him in black and white shadows, without any sight at all. 

It feels unreal, watching a red-caped hero flying down to rescue the damsel in distress like one of the comics she read about in Muggle Studies. She fucking hates that that’s what she’s become.

She doesn’t hate that Ron looks like the hero.

“Ron!” Peakes beams at him as he comes to a landing. Ron gives him a very obvious are you a fucking idiot look that even a fucking idiot such as Peakes should be able to catch.

He looks flushed and pissed off, sweat shiny on his forehead and heavy in his hair. The full Keeper kit he’s wearing can’t be helping, but it does further solidify her imaginings of Ron the Hero, protective armour and all.

“Leave her alone, guys.” He sounds tired, like he almost can’t be bothered with it. Pansy burns with embarrassment. With a flick of his wand, the binding hex disperses. She climbs to her feet, her hands and knees and most of the rest of her covered in mud.

“Don’t you think she deserves it? McGonagall should have expelled her.”

“No, I don’t think she deserves to be tortured with an unforgivable. Honestly, what the fuck is wrong with you guys?”

The three of them glance at each other, suddenly lost.

“If anyone should be expelled, it’s you.”

“She’s actually used Unforgiveables!” Cootes accuses.

“Because she had to. Have you ever heard of the term under duress?” Ron shakes his head. He makes eye contact with her and tilts his head like this way  “Come on, Pansy.”

Her lips part but no sound comes out.

When she stays mute, apparently a girl-statue now, he takes her arm and forces her to move. His hold is firm but gentle, his fingers don’t dig in like they might if he were being careless. He matches his pace to hers, even though his legs are longer and he could make her trip and stumble if he wanted to, leaving the group of bullies at the edge of the lake. Ron doesn’t even bother glancing back.

“Are you going to escort me all the way back to the castle?” Pansy asks doubtfully.

He lets go of her arm. She wishes he hadn’t, even if it had made her feel slightly infantile. “Seems a good idea. I don’t trust them to not follow after you.”

Pansy looks down at her hands and scrapes at the dirt jammed between her fingers, pushing it further beneath her nails. Ron’s supervision makes her feel heated, but not because she’s mad about it.

“Wish I hadn’t said no to being a Prefect this year, just to see the look on their faces for the points I would’ve docked.”

She drops her hands and flicks her gaze over his quidditch gear, chest pad pad and arm guards, gloves still encasing his hands. “Don’t you need to get back to practice?”

Ron shrugs. “Skye is dying to be a Keeper. Good for her to take a few quaffles to the head.”

Absently, Pansy squeezes her shoulder. 

“Are you hurt?”

“It’s fine. Pomphrey hates me anyway.”

“That’s not fair,” he says, holding out his arm to stop her, not quite touching.

“I don’t blame her, after last year.” She stops herself there, not wanting him to know how many younger students ended up in the infirmary because of her.

He’s pulling off his gloves, pinching at the fingertips of three fingers on his left hand until it’s loose enough to come off, and then the same with the other hand. Watching the methodical, practiced unsheathing of his hands feels inappropriate to say the least—that, mixed with the adrenaline come down from the threat of grievous bodily harm, a riot of confusing sensations swirls within her.

There's a bright red scratch on the back of his hand, she wonders why he hasn't healed it away.

“You don’t have to,” she tries, but he’s already pulling his wand from his pocket and doesn’t seem interested in listening to her half-hearted protests. He casts an anti-inflammatory charm on her shoulder and coolness seeps through like a cold press, the pain fading to a tingle.

She moves her arm tentatively, flexing her elbow. “You weren’t kidding about being good at healing charms.”

Ron just shrugs, “I’m not about to become a Healer or anything.”

“You could.”

“I don’t like blood.”

“Most people don’t, unless they’re a vampire.”

“People die in hospitals, swee–Parkinson.” He looks away, hiding his face from her as he begins walking again.

They walk in step together but Pansy doesn’t know quite where they’re going until they start up the staircase towards the eighth year turret. Most of the way, she’s just following, slowly deciphering where he’s leading. It’s a bit pathetic of her, the blinding fact that she would follow him anywhere.

“I need a shower,” he says, beginning to undo the latches on his arm guards. She does her best at only watching the deft movement from the corner of her eye. “It looks like you could use one too.”

Against her better judgement, Pansy flushes, staring down at her mud crusted knuckles. She never used to be such a red-checked idiot around boys. It should be her telling him what to do, not the other way around.

“Not like that. You smell like cherries.”

Pansy frowns, looking back to his face.

“Showers always help me feel better,” he says. They’ve reached the two entranceways to the boys and girls bathrooms. “Let me know before you head down for dinner.”

Instead of arguing with him and telling him she doesn’t need an escort and also, don’t treat her like a child, she just says, “Okay.”

✦

With her head tipped forward, the gentle spray of warm water (the tepid pressure being the main fault of Hogwarts archaic plumbing) only spills down her back, leaving her hair mostly dry. She watches wide spirals of dirt circle the drain, slowly but inevitably slipping through the grill and out of sight.  

Once out, she leaves her uniform in a pile that is both messy and dirty and pulls on clingy black lounge pants and a cropped cashmere gray cardigan instead. Layers it with her perfume, since she’d washed it off. Because he’d mentioned it positively, or so she had thought. Rethinking his words, she’s not sure what he had meant exactly.

She dithers in her bedroom, wondering if it’s too early for dinner, how soon is too soon to seek his presence again. Will he bark at her to leave him the fuck alone when she tries knocking on his door?

Before she can make up her mind, there’s a firm rap on the dormroom door. She pulls it open to find Ron on the other side; the role reversal is so stark, it’s as if in stepping out of the shower, she had also stepped out of a portal to a parallel universe. 

His expression is unreadable as his gaze flicks over her appearance. She suddenly remembers she forgot to dry her hair where the tips of it got wet, how ridiculous the spikes of it must look.

“Hungry?” he asks. “I’m starving.”

It’s only five, but she agrees. They walk down the stairs together and Pansy feels even more out of body than she did opening her bedroom door to find him on the other side. It’s all she’s wanted, to walk by his side out in the open—both to him and the whole school. Now that it’s happening, it’s like waiting for the banitreu maxima charm to go off.

They reach the entrance to the hall and pause. She has no idea what’s happening but she’ll do whatever he says.

“Let me know when you’re finished,” he says, looking back to her once he’s scoped out where his friends are. 

“It’s okay, I have Daphne and the others.”

He looks over to where Millie is sitting with a girl from Ravenclaw, not quite dubious but not completely convinced, either. 

Returning his attention to her, he shrugs and says, “If that’s what you want.” He turns and walks away before she can even open her mouth, can even decide what it is she wants, or figure out what he means by that—what does he mean by that? Since when did it matter what she wanted? 

Pansy floats over and sits next to Millie. Millie gives her a close-lipped smile, still edgy from the other day. Pansy hates apologising. Whatever the opposite of an apologist, that’s what she is. The antonym to repentant.

Half way through her abysmally boring plate of meat and three veg, the rest of the group arrives.

“Did something happen?” Blaise demands, sitting down across from her.

Pansy looks at him sidelong. “Why?”

“I heard Pissy have been suspended from the quidditch team.”

“Pissy?” Millie asks distastefully.

“P.C.C.”

“Ugh,” Millie gags delicately.

“A travesty,” Pansy says dully.

“Cootes was looking to be scouted before the end of the year. Might not happen now,” Blaise says gleefully.

“It’s the only thing he’d be intelligent enough to do,” Pansy mutters. 

“I almost feel bad for him,” Daphne agrees, piling her plate high with mashed potato and peas.

“Wonder why, exactly, Weasley suspended him.”

Pansy’s heart starts. “Weasley?”

Daphne outright laughs at the look on her face. “Not your Weasley. The other one.” 

“He’s not my Weasley,” she grumbles, eyes on her plate. “Also, there’s like seven of them.”

“Sure,” Millie says, just loud enough for Pansy to hear her.

“Pretty sure it’s six now, didn’t one of them die?” Daphne asks.

Pansy stabs her sausage too hard and it skitters off the plate.

“Careful, Pansy’s discovered empathy.”

“Shove off, Millie.”

✦

Instead of running off as soon as she sets her cutlery down the center line of her plate, Pansy stays, doing her best to participate in conversation and not make her friends completely hate her. It’s not totally selfless—she keeps an eye out for Ron, wondering if he’ll catch her looking and offer to walk her, even though she already turned him down. She’s trying to be covert but Daphne wiggles her eyebrows more than once when she catches her craning her neck. 

He’s sat a table over and further down, not ostracised to the end like her group is but center stage. Smiling and laughing with his friends, he’s probably already forgotten about her. Has better things to spend his time thinking about than the mindfuck of his pet cat being a girl with a gigantic crush on him. He probably only rescued her out of obligation—it’s what Gryffindors do, committing acts of bravery because it’s the right thing to do. Morality or the weight of a heavy conscience that begs to be relieved or whatever it feels like to be a ‘good person’—Pansy doesn’t know. She just knows that it isn’t selfish, and it doesn’t mean that he cares about her.

Pansy leaves the dining hall with Millie; one of them has an assignment due, while the other should be imprisoned in the library until June if she wishes to have any chance of succeeding academically.

“Sorry I said no one wants you around,” Pansy mutters.

“Pardon?” Millie says brightly, falsely obtuse.

Pansy stomps up the stairs, savouring each step. “If you want to psychoanalyse me, it’s probably projection, and not the fun Divination type.”

Millie sighs. “I know. It’s just—”

“I’ll try be better. I’m trying.”

Millie squeezes Pansy’s wrist, pulling her to a stop at the top of the landing. Pansy’s gaze remains steadfast on the floor.

“That’s all any of us can hope for,” she says, and then she’s kissing Pansy’s cheek, too quick for Pansy to panic and punch her in the tit like she did once in third year when Millie tried to hug her. She wasn’t trained for it, like a feral cat who has to be taught that pets are safe because no one had ever tried before.

Following Millie down the corridor, she scrubs at her cheek, trying to rid herself of the aftershocks of sensation, searing into the muscle.

Chapter Text

Pansy sits with her nose nearly pressed to the window, peering out to the darkness. Like a child playing pretend, she imagines sometimes that being a cat animagus has increased her ability to see in the dark. 

With the curtains drawn around her bed with nothing but the sound of her own breath, she’d felt as if she had been buried alone. Left to wither slowly as she died from lack of sunlight and overthinking.

She didn’t usually see Ron until third period on a Wednesday. But that morning, she’d seen him between first and second, on her way to Muggle Studies. It didn’t make sense—she’d memorised his class schedule after all, she knows he had Potions and then Care of Magical Creatures, so why was he up on the third story, passing her in the West corridor? It happened so quickly, when she turned over her shoulder to double take, he’d already gone.

It seemed their roles had remained flipped, as if the alternate universe she had imagined really existed. Instead of her following him, it suddenly felt as if he were following her. Departing from Transfiguration a moment after her, so they were in the hallways together on the way to the Great Hall for lunch. Instead of heading to the library to study afterwards, she saw him walking outside as she was on her way down to the greenhouses for Herbology. She told herself to not read into it—Ron isn’t very traditional with his study methods. He was probably on his way to sitting under a tree.

He was still hanging about in the courtyard when she was on her way to Charms, the sight of her perhaps reminding him that he should be on his way there as well. 

It made her nervous, so many Ron-sightings in a day she would start needing to write them all down to keep track.

And what does it mean? Anything? Everything? Nothing at all?

Laying in bed with sleep more evasive than ever, her body made the decision before her mind caught up. Bare feet met the worn rug beside her bed and then padded over wooden floors until she found herself sitting in the window seat, peering out as if she could make out anything this high up, this late at night.

Her eyes trace over where the outline of the Forbidden Forest would be and then up into the stars. Stargazing makes her miss Astronomy class, but she didn’t have the marks to continue at N.E.W.T Level. Even if she had, it wouldn’t be as practical as Charms or Transfiguration.

Whatever practical meant, anyway, when she has no idea what life after Hogwarts will look like.

Thinking about existing after June is overwhelming—thus, she usually avoids it. It’s a gaping void of unknown that’s terrifying to gaze into. 

Confronted by how big the world is, both by the stars and the unknown, Pansy feels smaller than ever despite being larger right now than she is most of the time.

She doesn’t want to move back in with her parents but she’ll likely have to until she’s built up enough savings working….working somewhere. She’s unsure about the employability of a Death Eater sympathiser. Not to mention the daughter of a war criminal, even if Irving Parkinson doesn’t carry the Azkaban-issued official label.

The greater concern, though, is the way her already low shine for life exponentially declines when in close proximity with her parents. She’s not confident that she can survive months of it with no end in sight—doesn’t want to. There would be no point in holding out for September if it didn’t alter where she slept at night.

If she somehow finds a job and saves enough money to move out before she kills herself, maybe one day she could take night classes for Astronomy, if she really wants. Borrow books off Granger and teach herself, if Granger and Draco last past graduation.

The brush of footsteps pricks at her ears a second before she catches his reflection in the black mirrored glass.

She turns to face him, startled.

Dimly lit by the low fire, Ron rubs the back of his head sheepishly, mussing his hair worse than it already was. His shirt lifts, exposing a strip of skin across his lower stomach.

“Hiya.”

“Hi,” she says, voice hushed like they’re in the middle of a holy seance. Pansy expects him to keep walking, on a mission to find that midnight snack he got up for. Instead, he comes even closer and then sits down in the corner of the window seat, back to the wall so he’s facing her.

“Fuck this is uncomfortable.” He shifts, trying to find a better position. “How do you sit here all the time?”

“You’ve got the wrong sort of arse,” she deadpans. 

He blinks at her.

“Not slippery enough.”

Ron barks out a laugh.

She looks away, trying to school her expression and hide how pleased she is. Her lips twitch, just once, and she forces it back down with a clench of her teeth. “Can’t take credit for the charming. That was Daphne.”

He nods sagely. “Aye, she seems like a dark witch.”

Pansy hums in agreement and they fall into silence. She can feel his eyes on her but is too anxious to make eye contact, so she returns to looking out the window. She has to stare hard to look past her own reflection and to the stars beyond.

“I’ve been thinking about you a lot.”

Pansy’s pulse thumps, she can feel it in her throat like a sudden, shocking drum beat. 

“I think I misjudged you,” he says slowly. “I realised…I don’t know you at all.”

He lets the silence fall again, waiting for her to reply. She is glad for the darkness, how it makes difficult conversations feel safer. 

“Most people don’t,” she says, tracing the reflection of his outline.

He presses his lips together, unsurprised. “It wasn’t like—entertainment?”

She turns to him—“No.”

“Seems a little voyeuristic.”

“I swear to Merlin, it wasn’t.”

“Okay, okay, don’t fall off your broom.”

Pansy deflates, her shoulder meeting the cool glass beside her.

She looks at him more closely, trying to decipher him like a tricky Charms chapter, to memorise him in a moment that isn’t stolen. “You were—” she looks away, eye contact too much during a confessional, “safe.” She swallows, eyes focused on where the wall meets the ceiling across the room. “You made me feel safe. In your room, it was—” Quiet. Warm. Something intangible that she had just known, through the sixth sense buried deep within her that she couldn’t question because it wouldn’t answer.  

Ron takes so long to respond, Pansy’s gaze makes its way back to him. He’s watching her, must have been watching her this closely the whole time she spoke. Her hands tighten to fists in her lap and she tries to pace her breathing.

Eventually, he blows out a slow breath. “Well, that’s a nice sentiment, at least. I know you’ve been having…a hard year.”

A short, sharp laugh escapes Pansy’s chest.

“Is there anyone else? Or is it just the Beaters.”

“Everyone’s having a hard year.”

Their gazes stick for a moment, like sinking, like knowing, and then Ron’s darts away.

“You don’t have to hide from me,” she says.

“It’s not fair.” Ron heaves a sigh. “You know everything about me, I know hardly anything about you at all.”

“I know.” She picks at a thread on the inter-house unity blanket. “What was I doing?” she laughs, dry and brittle.

“I don’t know how to explain it…I should be mad. I am mad. But it felt like…”

Pansy looks up at him, hopeful. He bites his lip, looking at her and then away and then back again.

“It felt like something. Like healing, or bleeding, or—something.”

“It was something to me,” she promises, hallowed.

The corner of his mouth tugs upwards slightly, enough to feed the monster that never dies, residing in her gut and ever hungry. Consuming desire and wishes, no matter how often things don’t work out for her, it always has something to feed on.

His tentative smile is hard to look at for too long and it’s well established that she’s a coward, so she lets her gaze fall to the empty space between them.

“I’d like to get to know you.”

Her head jerks up to look at him, desperate to see his expression.

Somehow, he’s confident and cautious simultaneously. “If you’ll let me.”

“I’m terrible company. Just ask any of my friends.”

Ron smiles wryly. “Lucky I don’t trust any of them enough to ask their opinion, then.”

✦

They stay up talking for hours. Surface level things, strictly nothing controversial. Favourite foods (hers was Blaise’s Dirty Martini pasta; she argued that Ron didn’t have one, which he proved correct when he listed five death row meals that he couldn’t narrow down any further) and movies (he was shocked that she’d watched any, which made her feel quite chuffed. Discussing Jurassic Park sidetracks them for twenty minutes). What McGonagall had said exactly—he seemed pleased to hear she wasn’t about to be shipped off to Azkaban. It makes Pansy unreasonably happy, she can even hear Millie’s voice in her head ‘the bar is in hell. Get some standards, Parkinson.’

It’s not until the sky shifts to navy, Pansy’s eyelids heavy and scratchy, that Ron suggests they try get some sleep.

“You might be able to fall asleep here, but I certainly can’t.”

Pansy yawns, gigantic and unflattering. “I’m surprised you lasted so long.”

“My arse went numb two hours ago.” He gets to his feet, putting on a performance of struggling as if he’s fifty years older.

Pansy giggles. Giggles. She tells herself it’s the sleep deprivation, making her loopy.

His door is sooner than hers, he pauses outside of it. She’s mildly disappointed that he’s not going to walk her to her door, but it’s not like they were on a date.

He hovers in his open doorway, as if he hasn’t fully made up his mind. “G’night, then.”

“It’s like five a.m.”

“Don’t remind me. Can’t believe I’m going to have to choose between breakfast and sleep.”

Pansy walks the rest of the way to her dorm room with a smile that she can’t temper, no matter how much she bites her lips.

In bed again, it feels as if a whole day has passed in the time since she gave up on trying to sleep. And the best day in longer than she can remember, at that.

She expects sleep to be elusive again, her mind too active replaying things he said, the way he smiled at her as if it didn’t cost him anything. But no. Her head on the pillow, heavy lids closed, a breath in and then she’s out like someone casting nox.

Chapter Text

She’s sitting in her usual spot in Charms, three rows from the back and on the far right. Both close enough to the front that she can pay attention and far enough back that she won’t be called on.

The seat next to her, usually reserved for Theo, is usurped by someone much larger—a head taller, twice as broad, and with a much worse haircut.

Pansy watches him out of the corner of her eye, wanting to ask what exactly he thinks he’s doing, but also feeling like she’ll spook him if she does. He looks at her briefly, long enough to shoot her a smile that spikes adrenalin through her heart but not long enough for her to react. Continuing his conversation with Harry, he starts sorting his books for class as if nothing is unusual.

There’s no academically relevant reason to sit next to her in Charms. She’s definitely not a person to try weasel notes out of. He hadn’t said last night that he would do this. She’d imagined talking in private, spending time together like they used to, where no one else knew about it.

Pansy realises, then, that she had expected to be kept a secret. It’s an odd dissonance, trying to shift her thoughts to try understand why he wouldn’t want that.

Sinking deeper into her chair, she tries to remember how to act natural. With rows of three, she suddenly feels like she needs to move away, like there’s some kind of ownership of this desk group that she didn’t know about and they’ve just now decided to enact it and kick her off.

Instead, Flitwick starts the class, Ron doesn’t tell her to fuck off, and she finds a new way of breathing—shallowly, in an attempt to avoid hyperventilating and overdosing on the scent of him.

The logical part of her brain knows he wouldn’t say something so cruel, but her nervous system is too used to expecting it.

Once class is finished, Theo joins her to head to the Great Hall. The hairs on the back of her neck are pricked the whole time—she knows Ron is only a few meters behind. Even if she couldn’t hear him cracking a joke that she doesn’t understand (he and Harry speak a language that no one else knows, too much said in the unspoken), she would still be able to sense him. Like a hellebore in the depths of a forest, stretching towards the light even when the sun isn’t looking.

✦

They arrive to Transfiguration near simultaneously, Pansy pretends like she hadn’t been aware of him leaving the Great Hall right after her, of being in every hallway at the same time as him. They sit together and it’s not strange, because they’re in the same group for the class assignment and Padma is there as well.

McGonagall lectures for twenty minutes and then gives the rest of class time to work on their assignments. 

Padma takes out a whole scroll of notes, unfurling it so it almost covers the entire desktop.

Before she can really get going, Ron asks “Is everyone happy with the food idea?”

Pansy glances between the two of them. Redundant; of course Padma was fine with it. The dark haired witch has deflated slightly, looking down despairingly at the amount of work she’s already put in.

She looks up, meeting Pansy’s gaze expectantly.

Pansy shrugs. “It’s fine. I’m sure we’ll get top marks if you’re happy with it.”

“Good,” Padma says, perking back up, and launches into what she already has planned. She wants to make two identical items with different internals, which they can then slice open in front of the class in their presentation.

“One will be cake inside. You’ll eat it, won’t you Ron.”

“Will that be safe?” Pansy asks suspiciously.

“Safe as anything conjured by magic,” Padma says brusquely.

“Made out of bricks and plastic.”

“A bit of plastic never hurt no one,” Ron jokes. “Especially if it tastes like chocolate cake.”

“Terry Boots’s toad died from eating plastic last month.”

“Nearly died,” Padma corrects. “And he was eating a mint wrapper.”

Apparently not going to win the argument, Pansy writes down in her notebook research food conjuring spells and longevity of transfiguration spells.

Ron mocks up a sketch of the final product—despite trying to keep her attention on the chapter she’s meant to be reading about food transfiguration, Pansy finds her attention drawn to his hands like a fly to a honey trap. Once she’s started looking, it’s too delicious, too difficult to stop. His fingers are long and blunt, the back of his hand broad and freckled, threaded with tendons that dance beneath his skin as he draws a surprisingly good rendition of a rubber duck with a slice taken out of it. She wouldn’t have predicted it, considering how atrocious his handwriting is.

Padma says something—Pansy doesn’t know what, having to drag her attention away from Ron’s hands to look at her. Padma smirks before repeating herself. “You have a study period on Friday afternoons?”

Pansy shakes her head. “Only the first hour.”

“Great, we’ll meet then, down by the lake? I feel best running experiments outdoors.”

“Whatever.”

“There, what do you think?” Ron turns his page around to display

“It’s really good,” Pansy says earnestly. 

“Do you like ducks?”

“Do people like ducks?”

“They’re cute.”

“I guess so.”

“You have to tell me the truth, Parkinson. You promised me.”

“I didn’t promise,” she says hotly. “I don’t hate ducks.”

“Guys. Can we please stay on task?”

Ron ignores Padma’s request. “Out of five, how much do you like ducks?”

“Like a three?” Was there a correct answer?

He nods, as if cataloguing her response. “What do you think rubber ducks are for?”

Pansy begins to frown; it sounds a serious question.

Padma makes an exasperated sound. “We need to focus, or we’ll have too much to do tomorrow. We should use class time productively.”

“I am using it productively,” Ron says, flipping his quill around between his fingers. “Tell me, Parkinson. What’s your favourite cake flavour?”

✦

“What’s your next class?” Ron asks.

Pansy waits to hear Padma’s answer. When nothing is said, she looks up and finds Ron looking at her expectantly.

“Oh! Um,”—her mind is a big black blank—“Divination.”

Ron swings his bag over his shoulder. “Okay, let’s go.”

Pansy is so surprised, she doesn’t even argue. She shoves her things into her bag, as if he’ll suddenly change his mind or decide to leave without her if she takes too long.

They end up walking with Padma, and Pansy wishes that she would just go away. Sure, they’re going to the same place but they don’t have to walk together.

“I forgot you do Divination, Padma,” Ron remarks. 

“I realised,” Padma says dryly.

That makes Pansy feel better about her presence—how much could Ron have liked her (still like her?) if he didn’t even know what classes she took? (Ron took DADA, Transfiguration, Charms, Potions, and Care of Magical Creatures.)

Walking down the hallways together, more than one person does a double take. Surprise or confusion to see them standing next together in a way that’s purposeful, not ordained by class assignment. It’s better than the revulsion or disdain Pansy is usually met with.

“Death Eater whore!”

Caught off guard, Pansy flinches.

“Fuck off,” Ron snaps. “Fifty points from Ravenclaw.”

“I thought you couldn’t do that.”

“You can’t speak to underclassmen like that, Ron.”

“Underclassmen shouldn’t speak to a senior student like that,” he argues. “I’ll get Ginny to take the points for me.”

“That’s corruption!” Padma protests.

Pansy tucks her chin and smiles, watching her feet eat up the hallway stones alongside Ron’s.

He walks them all the way to the ladder that leads up to Trelawney's classroom, even though they have to climb three flights of stairs to get there and he has DADA next across the other end of the castle.

“You any good at it?” Ron asks, gesturing up the ladder.

Pansy shrugs. “I’m alright.”

Padma makes a huffing noise and starts climbing.

“Predict something good, then. Treacle tart for dessert?” he suggests brightly. Eyes wide, expression effused with hope, she can’t help but want to fulfil his wish.

“I’ll see if the way of the winds wishes to speak with me today,” she says sagely.

The wide grin that spreads across his face feels like a reward in itself.

“See ya,” he says.

“Yeah.” She’s able to hold her smile back for only as long as it takes him to turn his back. It stretches embarrassingly wide as she watches him bound down the stairs at an unnecessary clip. 

Shaking her head to try rid herself of it, lest someone notice the explicit joy on her face and try to take it away, Pansy turns and ascends the ladder to class.

✦

Pansy is halfway to the library when she bumps into Ron. He seems surprised, so she tells the delusional part of her mind that suggests maybe he was looking for her purposefully to fuck off.

“I’m headed to the library,” he says, stepping half a step backwards.

“Me too,” she says.

He moves his chin in a kind of upwards half circle, a wordless come along then. Daphne elbows her, hard. Pansy shoves her when Ron’s not looking and then quickens her steps to catch up with him.

“I would’ve appreciated a pre-warning that you were escorting Pansy to class,” Daphne says haughtily. 

Daphne had arrived to Divination five minutes late. After being greeted by Trelawney's disapproval, she hissed in Pansy’s ear about how it was all her fault—she’d hung around the Charms class for ages before figuring out Pansy had left without her. 

Ron glances at Daphne, to check if she’s serious. Pansy widens her eyes to say yes but please don’t ask any questions.

“Gods Daph, I already apologised.”

“No you didn’t. You said ‘you’ll get over it’ and ‘cardio is good for your lungs’.”

“It is,” Ron agrees. “I think it’s your heart, though.”

“Pansy doesn’t have one of those,” Daphne says knavishly, eyes narrowed.

“I will push you down the stairs.”

Ron laughs. Pansy adds a second point to her tally.

Blaise approaches the library at the same time, from the opposite corridor. Unfortunate timing but unsurprising—Pansy can only have so many things go well in a row. 

“I see we’ve been relieved of our duties,” he says, like the overly formal git he is. Ron won’t know he’s taking the piss.

“The Beaters should be leaving Parkinson alone now,” Ron replies. “But let me know if they don’t.” Perhaps he’s practicing for his career as an Auror, embodying an intimidating authority figure—he says it so seriously. 

Pansy squirms. “It’s fine.”

“Is it because of you they got cut from the team?” Blaise enquires.

Ron shrugs. “Helps being a big brother sometimes. I can only pull rank with one of my siblings, might as well go big.”

Pansy’s brain whites out.

“That’s why I don’t have siblings,” Blaise says agreeably. 

“Don’t say that as if you’ve killed them,” Daphne says.

“Why would you do that?” Pansy asks.

“Should I be worried about Zabini?” Ron jokes.

“In your future as an Auror? No—well, maybe—”

“Oh, hey, there’s Harry. I’ll catch you later.”

“But—what—”

He’s already gone, jogging off to meet Potter, and Pansy’s left without any answers.

Daphne nudges her. “I told you it was Weasley.”

Her tone is shrill and unrefined; “You said it was the other one!”

Chapter Text

It’s the following week and they’ve slipped into an easy routine of Ron walking Pansy to her classes. Well, Ron makes it look easy—she’s not about to draw attention to it in case he realises walking all the way across the school grounds in the opposite direction of his class is a lot of effort, and Pansy isn’t worth it.

“I think Padma wants to curse us for being so near her in the alphabet.”

Ron smiles, mischievous and unsympathetic to Padma’s declining patience. “I still think we should’ve gone with your idea of wearable arts.”

Pansy sighs. “I think she’s right. We’ll get a better mark if it’s edible.”

“Who cares about the mark, wearable arts would have been more fun.”

She raises her brows at him. “More fun than getting to eat cake?”

“We could have dressed you up with an ice crown—Queen Pansy.”

She holds out one side of her school skirt, pretending to curtsy. 

He flourishes his arm, “Maybe I have this walk?” he says in a plummy accent. She laughs but takes it, any excuse to be close to him.

Was this flirting? She used to be so good at reading the signs, but she’s too blinded by how much she wants it to be sure. She can imagine doing this with Daphne just as easily, how was she to know whether he felt just as light and sparkling as she did?

A few days ago, she had slipped into his room as a cat. She’d figured they’d reached the point where that was alright again, and her brain was overloaded, Charms and Transfiguration terminology mixing with Herbology mnemonics, she needed quiet. He was at quidditch practice and returned both shining and smelling of sweat. His face lit up when he spotted her sitting in the space between his pillow and blankets.

“I’ll be right back,” he said, grabbing sweatpants and a hoodie off the floor before darting back out. 

He returned with his hair still damp from the shower and slid into bed next to her, pressing his face against her fur. She had stayed still, as to not break any spells. “I missed this,” he said. She rumbled embarrassingly loud with purrs.

Later, with one arm tucked around her and the other smoothing down her black coat over and over, he had said, “You know, you could shift back and then we could talk too.” Too. As if the cuddling could just continue.

She looked up at him imploringly. Was he serious?

“If you’re comfortable with that,” he added.

She shifted slightly, so she wouldn’t kick him accidentally, and then closed her eyes, not wanting to watch him watching her, and shifted. Maybe she’d been hoping for this, and that’s why she had donned her loungewear before coming here.

So she was lying in bed with Ron Weasley, the dip of his elbow cushioning her neck, and this time he wasn’t screaming and running away.

He grinned down at her. “I never would’ve thought you would be a blusher.”

“I’m not,” she retorted. “I know you are though, I just have to figure out what to say to trigger it.”

He had shaken his head, still smiling. He was so handsome, it was kind of painful to have it be directed straight at her.

Now, Pansy tries to trigger that flush, one that’s indisputably worse than hers.

“You’re such a handsome suitor.” It’s safe to say it, because they’re already pretending. “How many girls do you escort to their classes each day?” She bats her lashes and everything.

He narrows his eyes at her as the tips of his ears turn pink. “I know what you’re doing.”

She blinks up at him innocently, something she has never been but it’s fun to pretend with him.

Ron smirks. “I know you like me.”

“No, I don’t,” Pansy denies reflexively. She draws her hands away from where they had held his arm. He wasn’t supposed to just say it like that, that was cheating.

“Okay then—we’ll just be friends then. Any advice on how to get Padma to get over the fact I had some other girl in my bed the past three months?”

“No.”

He raises his eyebrows, humour dancing in his eyes. “Why not? That’s what friends do.”

“Everyone likes you, Ron. That’s the problem.”

Ron laughs. “That’s our problem?”

He swings his arm over her shoulder, pulling her close as they continue walking. Pansy lets him, grateful that he’s tall enough that she can hide the smile on her face.

Pansy’s mind is quiet, for once, and in the silence it circles back. He had been joking, but in truth there are too many problems to count Ron’s likability as the biggest. From immature house rivalries (snakes and lions aren’t friends, let alone romantic partners (if that were even an actual option for her)), to torture and death on opposing sides in the war. The actions they took and why; the greater good versus self preservation. The fact that he is inherently virtuous, and she is evil incarnate.

Wanted and unwanted; loved and despised; opposite sides of a coin. They might as well be on different planets.

“What are you doing?”

He pauses a moment, looking down at her. “Walking you to class?”

“No, I mean.” She stops, pulls out from the safety and warmth of his hold. The cool air immediately pricks. “The odds are stacked against us. What are you doing?”

“I don’t mind bad odds.” Instead of letting the distance between them hold, he’s swaying closer. “Heard it’s more fun to swim in the deep end, anyway.”

Pansy’s thinking something about sharks, trying to form something sharp and witty to say when he takes her hand, sliding his fingers between hers. Like holding hands with a tendril of Devil's Snare, she has no choice but to let it happen.

“What are you doing?” she asks again, her mind stalling.

“Holding hands. Friends do it, sometimes.” He starts walking, drawing her along at his side. He holds their hands together close to his side, forcing her to walk just as closely, the inside of their arms pressed together, her shoulder against his arm.

“Maybe when they’re five,” she mutters.

“Based on all the stories I’ve heard about when I was that age, five year olds have the most fun,” he says, refusing to ignore her muttered barbs. “I learnt how to ride a proper broom when I was five… I think I’d rather hang out with a five year old than most adults.”

“Of course you would.” She makes the mistake of looking up at him, drawn like a magnet to the north pole. He grins down at her, not denying it, and it’s like staring at the sun and her heart is burning up. 

Fuck. 

So much for the deep end, she’s already drowning.

“C’mon.” He tugs on her hand. “You’ll have to stop arguing with me or you’ll be late for class.”

“I like arguing with you. More than Herbology.”

“Arguing with me won’t help pass your N.E.W.T.’s.”

Pansy scowls. “I shouldn’t have told you how much I care about them. In fact, I take it back. I don’t care about my academics whatsoever. Please erase any contradicting information from your brain immediately.”

“Sorry, I haven’t mastered self-obliviation yet. The memories will have to remain.” He grins at her and heat rises up her cheeks. 

She’d admitted to him how much she cared about her marks when he’d gotten her all tender, tucked up in his bed where it felt soft and safe to tell him vulnerable things that no one else knew. (Her friends knew but she didn’t admit to it.)

It hadn’t even been sexual either, it had been like when she was in his bed as a cat, except this time she was a girl and he knew it was her and when he asked her questions and she felt pressed to answer them she was able to speak in full sentences instead of meows (because gods did she want to answer them, wanted to tell him everything even though she still worried it wasn’t safe, that she’d say something and he’d change his mind, or realise that he’d gotten to know her well enough to determine that his original assumptions of her sucking as a human being were in fact, correct). 

And she did answer. She had told only truths, and she would do it again. Even though he’s now weaponising it against her—because she’s found that she rather likes having someone on her side. She likes the way he encourages her to eat a full meal for breakfast because it’s good for her brain, sits next to her in class and reminds himself to not distract her. 

He slipped her food in the library the other day and she just about died—she knows how he is with snacks, how he hoards them and passes them out as if they’re rationed. He’d given her a whole handful of chocolate coated cashews, it’d taken the rest of the afternoon for her to eat them, using them as rewards for the end of each section she was studying.

“I’ll see you in the library?” His eyes dart to Blaise, already seated inside the greenhouse.

“You don’t have to worry. Pissy have been leaving me perfectly alone.” There’s actually been a sudden drop off in all curses, magical and not, hissed at her in hallways. The stream of gossip working in Pansy’s favour this time, word has spread that Weasley will deduct points in increasingly wild amounts to anyone who dares speak rudely to her.

“I don’t want to risk it,” Ron says.

“I’m a big girl.”

His gaze falls over her face, like he’s cataloguing, or noticing. Looking somewhere he hadn’t previously realised required his attention. His eyes stick when they meet hers. Cerulean skies, it gives her the same sensation as riding a broom on a clear sunny day. Weightless.

“What?” she asks when he remains unmoving, unspeaking. The tips of his ears are turning red.

He swallows, straightening to his full height. She hadn’t even realised the way they had been leaning closer together, how she has to adjust how far back her head is tilted to keep looking at him.

“I—”

Her brows raise expectantly. “You…”

“Gotta go. I’ll see you after class.”

“In the library?” she calls after him. “Blaise is here,  you don’t need to come all the way—”

“See ya!” He’s waving over his shoulder, jogging away. Maybe he’d forgotten something, or is meeting Harry and hadn’t told him he would be late from walking all the way down to the greenhouses.

Pansy joins Blaise at their bench.

“Was Weasley about to kiss you?” Blaise asks, a little revolted.

“No,” she retorts.

Was he? She looks out the window, searching for the shape of him. He’s already halfway back up the hill, strides long as he takes the steps two at a time. She watches his back—thinking how nice it is even though it’s just a back, how it has something that no other back does—the distance stretches between them like Droobles everlasting gum, until he’s gone from view.

She’d barely had time to adjust to the fact that he’d acknowledged out loud what they both knew—that she’s sickeningly in love with him. Kissing her so soon after? No.

All that aside, he wasn’t about to make their first kiss outside of Herbology class. She would’ve killed him.

Chapter Text

She’s in the window seat with Daphne, taking a break from studying in order to prevent her brain from falling out of her head by filling out a ‘WHICH SALEM SISTER ARE YOU’ quiz in Witch Weekly.

“If you were surrounded by Muggles, which spell would you not be able to help yourself from casting? A. a warming charm. B. fixing your eyeliner. Or C., obliviating someone because you spoke too loudly about being a witch.”

“This is boring. What’s the other quiz?” 

Pansy tries to jerk the magazine out of her eye line but Daphne’s already seen it. “Are you his friend or a crush?! Why are we doing this Salem Sister one, when the answers you need are right there!”

Daphne tries to grab at the magazine, but Pansy yanks it fully away from her, twisting so her legs are up in the space between them and she can kick Daphne if she really needs to. “You didn’t answer the question. I’m going to put you down for obliviating someone because you can’t shut up.”

“As if not being able to live without face alteration charms is any better,” Daphne says with an eye roll.

“I can’t help that I’m good at them.”

Daphne flicks her shin. 

“Ow. You know I bruise easy.”

“Your Weasley’s here.”

Instantly, her pulse rises, along with her head, seeking him out. He’s already looking at her (signs that he likes you. 1: you often catch him staring at you) and gives her a little wave when their eyes meet, still mid conversation with Harry and Seamus.

She looks back down to the magazine when their eye contact breaks, channelling nonchalance, and reads off the next quiz question; “Is your patronus a herbivore, carnivore, or omnivore?”

“Whose patronus is a fucking omnivore?” 

“Literally yours.”

Daphne frowns. “I thought foxes ate meat.”

“They do.”

“What? Fuck, I meant whose patronus is a herbivore. Oh, hey Weasley.”

Pansy looks up too quickly for it to be casual.

“Hey,” Ron says. He’s blushing, just slightly, a red flush creeping up his neck (2: he blushes when you say ‘hi’). “Do you want to hang out in my room?”

Pansy swings her feet back down to the floor. “Sure.” It’s not until she looks back up as she stands and sees his expression, that she realises he might be nervous. They’ve hung out in his room before, why is this any different?

“You guys still playing twenty one questions?” Daphne asks.

“We’re not counting questions,” Pansy says. “It’s called having a conversation.”

“I’ll take it that you haven’t gotten to the snogging part yet?” Daphne blinks up at her innocently.

Pansy narrows her eyes threateningly, slowly rolling the magazine into a scroll. She doesn’t need to verbalise anything for it to be intimidating.

“Ignore her,” she says, hand falling to Ron’s forearm. “Daphne’s got such a big mouth, she doesn’t know what to do with it.”

“I could tell you lots of things I do with my mouth!” Daphne calls after them.

“She’s really graphic in her stories,” Pansy says to Ron, leading him away. “Don’t get her started unless you want to be traumatised.”

“I’ll keep it in mind,” he says. 

In his room, Pansy flops down on his bed. His pillows are better than hers, not school issued but something he bought with all his thank you for vanquishing you-know-who money. They feel delicious against her neck and shoulders.

“Come on then. What have you come up with now?”

“Hmm?” He falls down next to her, spread out in a long straight line. She fiddles with the quilt between them, blue and green floral, wondering how long until she’s allowed to touch him.

“You know, your questions that slice me open so you can figure out if I’m secretly hiding being a terrible person.”

“I don’t think you’re hiding that you’re a terrible person.”

“Obviously. It’s right there, out in the open.” She gestures down her body, like it’s a neon flashing sign, STAY AWAY, THIS IS A BAD PERSON.

“In fourth year…” he begins.

“Fuck. Please no questions about fourth year. Or fifth.”

Ron smirks slightly. “You don’t have to answer.”

She rolls her eyes. Obviously she will.

“You can ask me a question about fourth year, too. I’m sure I did something stupid.”

“Just get it over with.” She hides behind her hands melodramatically.

“You were really mean to Hermione that year.”

Pansy swallows, parting her fingers just wide enough to be able to see him. She can’t deny that. What does Ron want from her, exactly?

Seeing her hesitation, he says, “I don’t think you’re an intentionally malicious person.”

“I was sixteen!” she protests. “I was definitely being intentionally malicious. You, Ron Weasley, have expectations much too high for me. You need to lower them, by like” she spreads her arms as wide as they’ll go, “this much.”

He captures both of her wrists, drawing them together between them. “I don’t believe you.” He looks at her so solidly as he says it, her breath catches.

Her eyes dart away from his, the connection too intense to maintain. “I was jealous, obviously. I wanted Granger to feel shitty like I did. She was dating Potter and—”

Ron laughs. “No she wasn’t.”

“Draco was so weird about it I couldn’t even tell which one of them he had a crush on.”

“Malfoy had a crush on Hermione back then?”

“Everyone had a crush on her. Theo definitely did, Cormac McLaggan made no secret of it. You did.”                          

“Not really. I just felt like I should. It didn’t feel like…” His eyes slide over her face, like he had done yesterday outside of Herbology. Beneath them, the quilt is shifting to reds and pinks.

“Feel like what?” Something is lodged in her throat, she’s surprised her words come out without a squeak.

“Like you.”

Her breath catches again and stays trapped at the cusp of her lungs when she doesn’t break eye contact—she’s being brave, or something. If Ron’s about to kiss her for the first time, alone and in his bed, the safest place in the whole world, she definitely won’t kill him. She might kill him if he doesn’t.

“What did you do that was stupid in fourth year?” she blurts out.

“Pansy.”

Her eyes are wide, breath coming faster than it should through parted lips.

“You’re very beautiful,” he murmurs. 

It feels like her heart might burst. She tugs on her wrists, his fingers still wrapped around them like shackles. “Please,” she begs, pitifully.

His mouth quirks in a quiet smile. Pansy has never felt so powerless.

He reaches up and cups her chin gently, his thumb pressed to the side of her jaw like she’s as rare as a chocolate cosmos petal.

“You shouldn’t,” she whispers.

She can feel his breath against her lips as he says, “I get to make my own bad decisions.”

And then there’s no space between them at all, his lips pressing against hers, soft and seeking. She hopes she gives the answer he’s looking for, parting her lips and kissing him back perhaps a bit too desperately, but it’s not her fault when she’s been in love with him for so long now. 

Recognising the fire in her, he deepens the kiss. Pansy burns up from the inside out, more flame than girl or cat or anything else, stoked higher and higher by the pressure of his body against hers, the way his hand spans her waist, the feel of his tongue in her mouth.

When the kiss breaks, she’s breathing heavily. She searches his expression for an answer, but what she finds there isn’t enough. “Good?” she asks.

A smile, like the sun through clouds. “Better than good.”

Relief floods through her. Hope that isn’t unfounded for once, that she’ll get to kiss him again.

“Although,” his smile turns rakish, “there’s no harm in practicing.”

Pansy rolls her eyes, but threads her fingers through the hair at the nape of his neck, tugging him both towards and over her at once.

✦

Ron must still be concerned for Pissy catching her alone (the name has stuck, despite Millie’s protests), because he even joins her in the library despite it being a Saturday. It’s agreed they’ll take the afternoon off from studying, though.

She’s been hesitating over asking him, turning the question over and over and over in her mind, until she’s viewed every angle, every potential inflection. She thinks about saying it, and then doesn’t. Tries to focus on her Herbology practice essay, but is reminded again when she has to write about Mandrake roots. 

Her mouth is opening and she’s speaking and then she’s half way through asking before her brain has caught up. “Will you take a photo of me, shifting? McGonagall needs it so that I don’t get sent to Azkaban.”

Ron blinks at her, not immediately saying anything.

“Unless you’d like for me to get sent to Azkaban.”

He sighs and rolls his eyes dramatically, but there’s a hint of a smile at the corner of his mouth. “Of course I don’t want you in fucking Azkaban, Parkinson.” He tosses the spinning disk he had been playing with onto the table (he claims keeping his hands busy helps him focus). “Where are we gonna get a camera from, then?”

“I’ll ask Blaise. He fancies himself an amateur photographer.”

Ron raises his brows with amusement.

“Lots of pictures of sunset over the Black Lake. If he’s too precious about it, we can ask Granger.” She only realises she’s defaulted to the plural after it’s already happened.

“Why won’t you call her Hermione? I thought you guys were friends now.”

Pansy shrugs. “It’s what Draco calls her.”

“Because he thinks it’s romantic or something.”

“Really?” she asks, nose wrinkling.

“Yes, Parkinson.”

She rolls her eyes and tries not to smile. (She’s not successful.)

✦

They pack up at midday, Ron complaining that he’ll fade away and die if he’s forced to eat a late lunch. He has his bag hitched on one shoulder and Pansy’s on the other as they wind through the aisles to the exit.

He leans closer before he speaks, all the fine hairs on the right side of her body rising. “You gonna do it in your knickers?”

Pansy ignores the heat in her own cheeks. “No,” she scowls.

“Disappointing.”

She cuts him a look.

“Seems fair to me, we’re on unequal footing.”

“Don’t act like you didn’t get an eye full when I shifted by accident.”

“I’m sure you saw me get dressed more than once. Watched me get dressed, even.”

Pansy opens her mouth in affront, but no words come out. 

“I thought it was just a weird cat thing,” he muses, looking far more chuffed than he should.

“You know what you look like,” she says, accusatorial. “It really wasn’t my fault.”

Ron laughs properly then. He takes her hand; apparently walking shoulder to shoulder isn’t enough for him. 

“I’ll help you get your photo.” He’s weaved their fingers together, she likes the feeling of being palm to palm with him. “We can investigate your knickers some other time.”

“Really,” Pansy says mildly, brows raised.

He grins at her, all teeth, and it makes her feel hot all over.

Chapter Text

“Hey, Sweetheart?” 

“Mmm?” Pansy hums, slowly dragging her attention away from the magazine she’s reading. She leans her head back to look up at him above her. Habits have shifted to sitting on the velvet chesterfield over the window seat, since she couldn’t figure out how to modify Daphne’s charm to include Ron’s ass.

Instead of speaking, he just looks at her, a soft smile on his face, bright eyes twinkling.

“What is it?” Pansy asks, smiling in return.

He blinks. “Do you want my last jelly bean? I’m ninety percent sure it’s cherry.”

“Sure.” She opens her mouth, head still tilted back. He places the sweet on her tongue and then rests his hand on neck, watching as she presses the sweet between her teeth. Flavour bursts as heat spools through her.

Someone is gagging across the other side of the room—likely Draco—but Pansy doesn’t care.

They watch each other for a drawn out moment, one of those ones where it feels like they’re alone regardless of where they are, not just the idea of happiness but the actuality of it, sun drenched freedom. His cheeks have dimpled with his smile, his eyes soft as he gazes back at her.

“You’ve got an apple in your eye.”

“Yes, I do,” he agrees, his hold on her jaw shifting before he leans down to kiss her.

“You might need to do a bit more studying, Pansy,” Hermione suggests from across the room. “It's the apple of your eye.”

“Fuck off,” they call back in unison. Ron grins at the way Pansy scowls.

“Now I want an apple,” Draco complains.

✦

She’d been stupid to think that just because she wasn’t directly overhearing it anymore, that people weren’t still talking shit about her. Hovering nearby the group of sixth year girls, positioned behind the bench they sit on, she’s basically asking to overhear something that hurts her feelings. And yet, she’s still here.

“Wish I could hex her without Weasley demolishing our house points.”

“Really?” Asked eagerly. “What would you do?”

“Curse her bald, probably. Imagine!” They spend a while laughing, mimicking what her reaction would be, how ugly she would be without hair, the size of the boil they think she’s hiding behind her fringe.

“Honestly, what’s he doing with her? We’re way hotter, and we never tried to fuck the Dark Lord.”

A cackle of laughter. “I bet she did! I bet the Death Eaters ran her through.”

“Honestly, who would want to go near her after that?”

A snort. “Maybe she imperio’d him.”

Anger pulses through her and she can’t even do anything about it. Even with McGonagall’s help to register her animagus status legally, they won’t give her a pass for using her claws against anyone. 

Why is she still here, when she can’t do anything? Self-flagellation, a punishment to compensate for how kind Ron is to her, when she doesn’t believe she deserves it?

She leaves, dashing across the empty space of the courtyard to slink along the wall, some part of her wary that someone who hates her will click that it’s her, take advantage of her vulnerable form and kick her.

She spies a cluster of the eighth year Gryffindor boys and hovers within their radius, hoping that Ron will join them. The way his face would light up upon recognising her would soothe this ache inside of her.

“Can we trust her?” Seamus asks.

“As far as I could throw her,” Dean counters.

“I think we’d know if Ron was under the Imperius Curse.” Neville.

“There are other forms of brainwashing.”

Seamus grunts in agreement. “He’s cunt struck.”

Pansy bristles.

“I’ll have a chat to him.”

“Wait, Dean—” Neville tries to stop him, but not very hard. Dean’s already jogging off towards the quidditch field.

If Ron’s about to be convinced—rightly so—out of whatever is happening between them, Pansy isn’t going to hang about and watch.

Once she has a target in mind, she reaches it quickly. Slipping rapidly down stairs like water down a slope, and then a bee line to the forest.

She buries herself within the thick trees, avoiding fresh fox trails and not pausing to say hello to the thestrals. Deep enough that she can try lose herself, moving fast enough to not have enough space left over in her brain to ruminate on Ron’s slow realisation that he’s been wasting his time on her.

✦

A silver, shimmering golden retriever made of light bounds through the forest. 

It’s jaw unhinges and Ron’s voice flows out; “Where are you, Pansy? I can’t find you anywhere. Will you meet me by the Lake?” A long pause. “Please, Sweetheart. I’m—worried.”

It takes her a while to orientate herself, having to pause to listen and sniff the air to ensure she’s heading in the right direction.

She steps out of the forest. It doesn’t take long for her to spot him, sitting on a log with his back to the lake. Already facing her, correctly having anticipated what direction she would come from. His eyes catch on her, recognition shifting the slant of his posture.

He waits for her to approach him first, like she’s as skittish as she once was all those weeks ago. She can see in the way he holds himself, hands gripping the trunk beneath him, how he restrains himself from moving closer.

The heat of his warming charms flows over her when she breaches its range.

“I thought you’d be in the forest,” Ron confirms. “Sorry I’m too much of a wimp about the spiders. I thought about going in but—” he shudders. “And I knew I’d probably get lost looking for you.”

She rubs her face on his leg, to say that it’s okay. He wouldn’t have the heightened senses to tell which tracks were acromantulas. 

He leans down to pat her head, fingers moving soothing and solid against her skull.  “What are you doing out here anyway?”

She ducks her face, head butting his shin.

“Will you shift back?”

Pansy shakes her head.

Ron cracks a small laugh. “It’s uncanny when you do that. Come up here with me, at least,” he says, patting the log next to him. She does as he says, sitting next to him a while.

Had Dean gotten to him? If he had, why is he here? Perhaps as long as she stayed a cat, he wouldn’t end things with her.

The warming charm weakens but he doesn’t recast it. She stands and moves to sitting in his lap. His fingers weave through her fur, soothing patterns drawn down her spine. He doesn’t hurry her to leave. 

Later, Ron carries her back to the castle, bundled up against his chest. The beat of his heart is solid and even against her side, hers a wild, quick thing against his fingers where he holds her close.

He murmurs sweet nothings in her ears, like a secret just for them, so soft and understanding that she forgets to feel like a stupid inconvenience.

 ✦

Pansy doesn’t go home for Christmas. She tells Ron more than once that he should.

“You’re starting to make me feel like you don’t want to spend Christmas with me, Parkinson.”

“I do want to spend Christmas with you. But so do seven of your direct family members, plus Harry Potter. Probably Granger, too. It’s not right for you to stay here with me.”

He tucks her hair behind both her ears how she hates, leaving her exposed. She tries to tuck her chin, but he won’t let her hide. “You can’t be alone on Christmas,” he says solemnly.

“Theo’s here.”

“He’s going to Malfoy’s for the day of.”

“See, like you should!”

“I’m not going unless you come with me.”

Anxiety bangs on her chest. She shakes her head, “I can’t do that.”

Ron groans, flopping down on the bed. It’s what he really wants—not to stay at Hogwarts the whole break, but for Pansy to give in and agree to go with him to the Burrow. But she’s not brave enough to face down a whole den of lions.

✦

Pansy is on edge waiting for her owl to arrive, even before she hears that people have started receiving theirs. Since June turned to July, she’s refused to leave Nott Manor, fearing the owl will get lost if she goes to the Burrow or Grimmauld Place. Ron tells her she’s just being silly—apparently an owl found Harry, Hermione, and Ron all at the Burrow without a problem to deliver sixth year O.W.L. results. Pansy would rather remain at the address Hogwarts has on file for her than risk it. 

She banishes everyone except for Theo, because she can’t exile him from his own house (Nott Manor is a step above her parents’ place, at least), and Ron. 

Theo was the only person she felt comfortable accepting an offer from to stay with once school finished. All the others had parents around which Pansy imagined would be horribly uncomfortable, but Theo’s dad was conveniently dead (his mother’s death less convenient, but also less recently). The house would likely collapse around him if Pansy weren’t around to cast fixing charms, so her presence is beneficial, even if it’s not financially so, and that goes a long way in making her feel less like a burden.

Theo mentions very casually that he’d gotten a text from Granger that the Patil twins had received their marks. Instantly, Pansy’s anxiety shifts from a low, consistent simmer to an unignorable spiral. She demands to know when exactly—Theo shrugs, “I was asleep when the message came through.”

 She promptly bans Theo from continuing to exist in the same room as her.

What little remains of the morning is spent switching between her girl and cat shapes, unable to settle.

A cat curled into a circle, tail flicking incessantly. Ron’s working on perfecting a charmed chess set that George might sell at the joke shop (apparently, all the charmed sets he’s played against are too easy), he reaches over to take hold of her tail so it twitches within the confines of his loose fist.

A girl huddled in the corner of the couch, staring blankly at Theo’s TV. It’s currently playing Home Alone —a movie they’d bonded over during Christmas and didn’t think should be limited to December, joking about Christmas in July. Ron had put it on thinking it might calm her down. It hadn’t.

Instead, she chews through all of her finger nails, until all she’s left with is her pinky. Ron routinely casts a healing charm so her fingers don’t sting too badly.

“You should eat,” Ron says, his plate stacked with a tower of sandwiches high enough to indicate he’d factored in her having one, but he’d still manage to eat them all if she didn’t. She just shakes her head, face pinched. He squeezes her knee and then settles in to eat, his eyes fixed to the TV. They’ve reached the climactic scene of little Kevin being hooked to the back of a door like a coat. 

Kevin’s finger is under threat when a black spotted owl with orange eyes and positively insane eyebrows raps on the window.

Pansy shoots up from her spot curled at the corner of the couch. Her hands are shaking as she unlatches the window, cursing herself for not preparing and having it already open.

Out of her pocket, she takes the owl treats that have been slowly congealing over the past week as she moved them between outfits. The owl doesn’t seem fussed about it, holding out its foot for her to untie the letter.

Ron comes up beside her and takes over, his hands moving smoothly where hers had been uncooperative and jittery.

He hands her the envelope, eyebrows hoots and flies back out the window.

“Whatever happens, it’ll be okay.”

“Promise?” she asks, weak and pathetic.

He smiles at her wryly. “Of course. You can live above George’s joke shop if you get sick of Theo.”

“Hmm,” her hum comes off higher pitched than it should. “He did tell Hermione that he likes me.”

“’Course he does. Come on.” He nudges her.

She hooks her finger beneath the corner flap. “No, I can’t.” She shoves the letter at his chest. “You do it. I can’t do it.”

Ron gently grasps her wrists. “Yes, you can.” He pushes her hands, and the envelope, back.

“Fine, fine.” Pansy shakes out her hands, one at a time. “Okay, fuck.” She rips the envelope open, shakes out the sheafs of parchment.

Unfolds, stares. Blinks.

“My girlfriend’s a genius!” Ron crows.

“I’m a fucking genius!” Pansy thrusts both hands up over her head and lets out a victorious squeal. Ron’s arms wrap around her, lifting her off the floor.

“I fucking told you, Parks. I fucking told you.”

She lets out another non-word noise of excitement, dropping her hands to his head, smoothing over his hair to hug his copper head to her chest. He spins them around in a manner she would usually complain of being dangerous, but she’s fizzing too much to remember concerns of bodily harm.

He shifts his head to look up at her, so she loosens her hold on his head. He’s grinning nearly as wide as she is. “I’m so proud of you.”

Pansy’s smile slips at his genuineness. His heart is too big, she can’t stand it. “Don’t make me cry, Ron Weasley.”

“I’d never do that, Sweetheart.”

She shakes her head at him—he’s definitely making her cry—and both leans down and tugs him upwards, so he’ll bring their faces closer. With her eyes closed, she can pretend like happy tears aren’t falling, and a girl who is a cat, who is as persistent as a weed, kisses the sun.